Grimm Audio makes equipment for two audiences that rarely share a catalog: recording studios and listening rooms. The company was founded in 2004 in Veldhoven, in the Netherlands, and it is still run by its owners — Eelco Grimm, a working sound engineer and researcher who contributed to the EBU R128 loudness standard, and Guido Tent, an electrical engineer whose career ran through analog, RF, and EMC work at Philips.
The first product was a converter for studio use, and the master clock that followed came directly out of refining that converter's clock circuit. Grimm states the CC1 is the lowest-jitter master clock in professional audio. The studio cable series was developed for Wisseloord Studios. None of this is heritage decoration — it is the same engineering that shows up in the domestic products, which is the reason to pay attention to them.
The MU2 is the clearest example. It is a streamer, DAC, and analog preamplifier in one box, built around a discrete FPGA-based converter Grimm designed itself, pairing its own upsampling filters with an eleventh-order noise shaper. The LS1 active loudspeaker series applies the same thinking to the harder problem: fully active DSP designs with phase-corrected crossovers, topped by the LS1c and its carbon-composite tweeter developed jointly with SEAS. The SB1 subwoofer uses digital motional feedback, which Grimm states lowers distortion by 30 dB and places the driver's resonance below 20 Hz.
Everything is designed and made in the Netherlands.
An LS1 system with an MU1 at its head replaces an entire rack of separates, which makes it one of the more clarifying demonstrations in the shop — arrange a listening session, or read about how we run our rooms on Just Listen.
