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Constellation Audio Shoots for the Stars -- Part OneAudacious start-up assembles a veteran “dream team.”
by Michael Fremer | March 19, 2010
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When the groundbreaking $150,000 Caliburn turntable is your first venture into high-end-audio manufacturing, what do you do for an encore? This question must have crossed the minds of Continuum founders David Payes and Murali Murugasu even before the first Mark Doehmann-designed Caliburn sold.
The less expensive but no less ambitious Criterion turntable followed, but both Payes, an outgoing Australian businessman and attorney, and Murugasu, a Glasgow-trained physician who became an audio importer when Australian law prevented him from practicing medicine, saw greater opportunity in products with wider appeal among audiophiles.
So two years ago, with Continuum firmly established in the world audio marketplace, Payes, Murugasu and a third, unnamed partner established Constellation Audio to produce a “state of the art” line of high-performance electronics intended to be every bit as innovative and distinctive as the products from Continuum.
Had I never heard of Continuum and had I simply wandered into the Constellation room at the Consumer Electronics Show, I’m sure the products would have sufficiently impressed me to write about them in a show report, but I doubt I would have requested an interview with two of the company’s founders, just as I hadn’t after first encountering the Caliburn at the 2005 CES.However, after reviewing and purchasing the Caliburn, I got to know the team behind the company and the products. The Caliburn is easily my favorite material possession. The musical information it pulls from record grooves never fails to astonish. Yes, there was some risk involved in the purchase. Continuum was a brand-new company. Would it survive? Who would support the product if the company folded? Would such a complex piece of machinery be reliable under normal consumer use, never mind in a reviewer’s system, where it would be used with far greater intensity and be subject to repeated abuse?
