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NEIL SINCLAIR IS A TOOLMAKER ON A MISSION. In a modern world of home entertainment gone mad for movies, this old-school audio buff, music lover, and entrepreneur patiently plies his trade, thinking up elegant digital instruments-“tools,” he calls them-to make sound systems sound more like-life. Back in 1984, the grim truth of the compact disc's “perfect sound forever” prompted Sinclair, in search of a higher perfection, to help create California Audio Labs. Three years later the same quest drew him off in another direction, to form a company whose innovation has won plaudits from critics and made it an exemplar for serious listeners. Meet Neil Sinclair, the quiet thunder behind Theta Digital.
“I like good tools,” muses Theta's soft-spoken president, invoking a favorite theme while rather spectacularly understating the rigor and sophistication of devices such as Theta's Casablanca surround-sound processor. “I'm not really into possessions-with the exception of good tools-and I've been lucky enough to be a part of creating some that didn't previously exist. It's been a tremendous amount of fun to realize the need, to conceptualize the solution, and to find that other people had the same need.” From the startup of California Audio Labs to the advent of Theta and the latest iteration of the Casablanca, every tool Sinclair has envisioned and helped to refine has been aimed at fixing one thing: digital sound. Now 50, Sinclair recalls the halcyon days of 2-channel and tubes, when the holy grail was hi-fi that really sounded like music, and when it seemed so close-back when he operated his own audio salons, before the chilling dawn of the compact disc. “Like a lot of other people in this business, I came into audio from the music side,” says Sinclair. “I was a musician, a drummer. I played in rock bands and jazz groups, with anybody who needed a drummer. I was always the artist, the dreamer. When I was a kid, I was into science fiction and music. Electricity and electronics were a mystery. Music wasn't. Music was the overriding, driving force. But electronics was the door into the future, and, I thought, an obvious pathway into more things to do with music.”
When it came time for college, at the University of California at Los Angeles, Sinclair decided on the dual pursuits of business and interior design. But he also kept hearing the dual drumbeats of music and audio. He went to work in a hi-fi shop, played gigs at night, and studied. It was the same consuming regimen that still keeps him working “70 hours a week.” By the time he was 25, he had opened his own high-end audio store, called Absolute Audio an attitude on a marquee and the proclamation of a life's quest.
“There weren't all that many high-end stores
in those days,” Sinclair says. “Maybe 10 in the whole country.
But I just wanted to get something done. By the '70s, the influx of
Japanese brands--the first waves of transistor products, which delivered
the sizzle without the steak-had begun to dominate the American market.
It was hard to find good sound.” Day and night and weekends,
Sinclair and his fellow fanatics tweaked and worried components to
summon the finest
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