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“I felt like we were losing the music, the way the CD sounded,” he remembers. Sinclair's answer was to create a new tool, a new and more elegant CD player. That same year, he and a partner formed California Audio Labs to manufacture, says Sinclair, “if not the world's first high-end CD player, then certainly the first American one.” In a radical departure from the solid-state norm, CAL used vacuum tubes in its CD player. Still, within three years, I Sinclair found himself bailing from CAL when some voices in the company urged “turning the company downmarket.” That was I exactly opposite the direction in which a visionary who had I named his store Absolute Audio wanted to proceed.

“I wanted to push the edge of the art,” explains Sinclair. “The multinational companies that controlled the CD wouldn't tell us anything, but I was sure we could make improvements on the digital side and create something much better. What soon became Theta had been an ongoing Sunday-afternoon project of a group of really bright people with a supercomputer, trying to build something for ourselves. The price would have been too expensive to think of it as a consumer product. Then computer prices began to fall.”

And in 1987 Theta became a commercial venture, with Sinclair as its spiritual father and president. He would run the business and have the last word on matters of aesthetics and ergonomics; others would execute the ever more complex digital designs. Just as CAL had arisen to fill the void of a highend CD player, the company Sinclair likes to call Team Theta was spawned from another need for a new kind of tool. “We really created Theta to make an outboard digital-to-analog converter,” says Sinclair. “At the time, such a product category didn't exist.” That first D/A converter was the DS-Pro.

“The CD players of that era started to have digital outputs,” says Sinclair, “but there were no D/A converters. Philips said you could display on your TV set the CD-booklet cover and track titles. As it turned out, nobody really wanted that, but the digital output was there. And the D-to-A in CD players was so rudimentary, doing the math badly. By using high-speed [digital signal processing], we were able to come a lot closer to what was on the disc. That was the reason for starting the company. We really wanted it to be part of CAL, but our partners there thought it would be a distraction. They wanted to make CAL the Nakamichi of CD players and appeal to a wider market.” Thirteen years and six generations later, the DS-Pro is still around, a finely honed 2-channel tool in a brave new multichannel world.

Sinclair makes no pretense of being an engineer. He's more a seer and evangelist, one who lives and breathes the gospel of a higher, better form of audio. Not every influence of his early years encouraged a life amid tubes and turntables. He was born in Los Angeles to a father who owned Sinclair Paints, the largest paint-manufacturing company on the West Coast. Dad, the younger Sinclair recalls, looked at his son the drummer and audio zealot and saw the makings of a firstclass bum.

“So I tried the paint business, part-time while I was in college and full-time afterwards. But it didn't last. The truth is, there are times when I wish I had kept on with that. It would be nice to have audio as a pure hobby. What I've done is like turning love into a business. If you woke me in the middle of the night and said, 'What do you do?' I'd probably still say'I'm a musician.' ”

But what does a musician do when, suddenly, the music stops? Sinclair had reacted to the sterility of early CD players by engendering a better machine, then refining that solution with an outboard D /A converter and a whole new company. One day, however, “about five or six years ago,” as he frames it, Sinclair found himself confronted by a cultural sea-change that no one could have foreseen: In the hearts of many American consumers, in the passions of many who were once audiophiles, music itself had lost primacy. With the ascendancy of home theater and multichannel audio, the new paradigm was movie sound.

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