Shunyata Research was founded in the late 1990s by Caelin Gabriel, who came to audio from military research, where his work was the detection of very small signals buried in noise. That is still the company's subject. Power delivery and noise are treated as engineering problems with measurable answers, not matters of taste.

The company developed its own measurement method, DTCD analysis, to study how current actually moves through conductors and contacts under instantaneous demand, and it uses those results to choose materials. The details follow from the measurements: hollow-core VTX conductors, connector contacts machined from pure copper rather than the usual brass, and a patented charge-reserve circuit that addresses AC line reactance without coils or transformers. Power distributors run from the Everest-X and Eiger-X reference designs down through the Venom line, with cables tiered from Omega-X to Venom across power, speaker, and interconnect.

That same engineering left the audio world some time ago. Through its sister company, Clear Image Scientific, Shunyata builds power distribution for cardiac electrophysiology labs, where clinicians read heart signals at the edge of the noise floor — Scripps, Jefferson Health, and the Minneapolis Heart Institute among them. Its power products are also in Skywalker Sound, David Gilmour's Astoria, and Rick Rubin's Shangri-La. Everything is hand-built at the company's facility in Washington State.

Power is the one upgrade that touches every component at once, which is why it is worth auditioning with your actual electronics in mind — the same McIntosh, Luxman, or dCS Audio gear we set up and play in the shop.

We carry Shunyata Research by consultation. Contact us or visit for the current range.