Doshi Audio

Handcrafted in America

Next year is Audio Therapy’s 10th anniversary and to help celebrate that landmark, the business is slowly entering a period of expansion and growth. Our demonstration room underwent a major refurbishment which was completed at the start of this year and I’ve been carefully searching for a couple of additional world class brands that will achieve two goals: elevate the business into a new position and compliment our existing brands and products.

It’s been ten years of demonstrations, home trials, long conversations with people about what they’re actually trying to achieve with their system, and of very carefully choosing which brands I put my name to. That last part matters to me more than anything. I’ve never wanted to be a dealer with a wall of brands and a price list. I’ve wanted to carefully curate a portfolio where every brand earns its place, and most importantly where the brands and products have genuine synergy with one another and with Doshi Audio I’m adding something incredibly special into the mix.

Who are Doshi Audio?

If the name is new to you, you’re not alone — and that’s sort of the point. Doshi Audio is the work of one man, Nick Doshi, and it’s a company that has kept a deliberately low profile for the best part of two decades while quietly building a formidable reputation based on the exquisite performance of this products.

A key figure in high end audio once said to me words along the lines of ‘Doshi Audio is one of the best kept secrets in the whole industry’ and he’s not wrong.

Nick’s story is a good one. He caught the bug as a ten-year-old at a classical concert, where a recording engineer indulged him by playing back the tape of the performance he’d just captured. That was that as they say. He went on to a career as a broadcast engineer, building equipment for friends along the way, and the professional world left its mark on everything he does.

In his early days Nick built a phono pre-amp for the radio station he worked for at the time, it was an incredibly sophisticated model, with discrete class-A drivers, servos and superb measured specifications. But, it was comprehensively beaten by his friends valve phono stage which used a slightly modified circuit lifted from a 1954 handbook, this simple design just got out of the way of the music and it taught Nick a valuable lesson. The specification and measurements don’t matter as much what you hear and experience.

That philosophy runs through every Doshi product: keep the circuit simple, keep the gain stages to a minimum, use as little feedback as you can possibly get away with, and then obsess over the things that actually matter — power supply design, vibration control, and component quality.

Complexity doesn’t get you closer to the music, it gets in the way of it.

As Nick puts it himself, he’s entirely agnostic about the devices; he uses valves and transistors wherever each one is genuinely the better tool for the job. Doshi don’t make ‘tube amplifiers’, they manufacture a range of products that just happen to use tubes and there’s a distinct difference.

There isn’t a huge array of products either, with only 5 models the range is  incredibly concise, we have a Line-stage, a Stereo Power Amplifier, a pair of Mono Power Amplifiers, a Phono-stage plus a Tape-stage. Doshi is a boutique operation by design, not by limitation — and that’s exactly why the people who know this space rate it so highly.