AXPONA 2025

At Munich High End 2024, my biggest discovery was Switzerland’s Wattson Audio. It’s easy to hear a sonic kinship between Wattson and its new owner, CH Precision—an affinity that helped explain CH’s acquisition of the company last year.

At AXPONA, Wattson introduced its new Madison amplifier ($6495), a fully discrete, class-AB, dual-mono design rated at 50Wpc into 8 ohms. Configurable for stereo, mono, or biamp use, it was paired with the Madison LE Streamer ($4995), launched in 2023.

Kevin Wolff, CH Precision’s director of global sales and US distributor for Wattson Audio, and John Giolas, Wattson’s vice president of marketing, explained that the connection between the two companies began at Goldmund, where Florian Cossy and Thierry Heeb—later co-founders of CH Precision—first worked together. They went on to launch Anagram Technologies. Later, another Goldmund engineer, Alex Lavanchy, joined Cossy as head engineer at the Swiss OEM firm that created Wattson Audio. Originally called ABC PCB, the company was later purchased by Hervé Delétraz of darTZeel and renamed “Engineered”—a name change that suggests more effort was spent on circuitry than branding.

Wolff explained via email: “The most acclaimed solution from this ABC PCB is their streaming interface, used by many leading EU and Swiss audio companies, including CH Precision. This is the board or part that gives streaming DACs their UPnP/Roon Ready/Audirvana/Tidal Connect functionality. Alex took this interface and created the Emerson Digital. It is with this component that the foundation of Wattson Audio was formed.”

The Madison LE Streamer builds on the foundation of the Emerson Digital. Heeb also designed the PEtER spline filters used in all current CH Precision digital products. According to Wolff, these filters “pretty much eliminate pre- and post-ringing.” A variant of the PEtER filter is implemented in the Madison LE, contributing to its shared sonic DNA.

Eventually, Cossy and Heeb founded CH Precision—the “C” and “H” drawn from their names. Today, CH owns Wattson, whose products they had a hand in developing from the start.

The sonics, through Magico S3 loudspeakers ($45,500–$52,500/pair) and a combination of Nordost Blue Heaven and Red Dawn cabling, were wonderful. An excerpt of a streamed file of Pierre Boulez’s recording of Mahler Symphony 3 sounded whole and complete.

Alas, the network froze in the middle of Allan Taylor’s “The Tennessee Waltz,” prompting Wolff to switch to a lower-resolution CD played on CH Precision’s D1.5 CD/SACD/MQA transport ($38,000).

On a master-sourced recording of Buddy Holly singing “True Love Ways,” the system sounded superb—exceptional not just for the price, but by any standard. I ate up how clearly the system revealed Holly’s subtle use of vibrato to heighten emotional expression.

Wolff then switched to an older digital recording of Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting Friedrich Gulda in Mozart’s Piano Concerto 23. The nimble woodwinds sounded sublime. So did Jon Batiste performing “Dusklight Movement” from Beethoven’s Blues, and Billie Eilish crooning her way through “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” off Hit Me Hard and Soft. This system had no difficulty delivering big bass and layered vocals with clarity and ease—enough to keep me rooted in the room longer than I’d planned.