As many of you may already know by now, Asahi Kasei Microdevices suffered a catastrophic fire this past week at their main production plant for audio ICs. Beyond anything else, we are devastated for AKM, relieved at the reports that all their staff members were evacuated safely, and from the bottom of our hearts we’re rooting for as speedy and painless a recovery for AKM as possible. Many designers, including us, feel AKM Velvet Sound™ A/D and D/A chips are simply the best in the business, and we are hardly the only company in professional audio that has built our product line around them. The world would sound worse without Asahi Kasei.

While this tragedy will certainly be felt throughout the industry for some time, we’d like to assure our users that we have enough existing parts stock that we feel this terrible fire will not affect our production capacity at this time. We will continue to monitor the situation, and we’ll keep you all in the loop if anything changes.

Yours in music,
-The Ex Machina Family