The Multimedia Manager is a component that packs together the most advanced digital technology. After all however, it creates sounds in pretty much the same way as conventional audio devices like amplifiers. We can make relatively good sounds just by using and combining high-quality parts. But if we tune and re-tune and push those parts to the limit, the sound can be exceptionally good. This allows the real power of the high-quality parts to shine through. Accepting no compromise, I pushed the designs and the parts to the limit, including minute adjustment of the resistance value, changing the capacity of the condenser and rechecking the circuit structure surrounding the power source. I had the freedom to select the parts I wanted – from circuits to components – putting the full priority on sound quality. Some of the parts turned out to be very expensive for mass-produced products, but I asked the company to grant this big favor and was resolute to get the best.

I spent an enormous amount of labor on the sound quality evaluation. This is because the media sources have been multiplying over time, from CD to DVD-Audio/Video and MP3, and also system formats have been advancing from two-channel, to three-channel, four-channel, 5.1-channel and even beyond. The number of points that need to be evaluated is now astronomical, and we carefully repeated test-listenings and re-tunings in order to realize the supreme sound quality deserving of the AlpineF#1Status name for every media and for every system structure combination.

Just when the development side was about to declare the product ready for mass production, the marketing and sales sections told me that they thought it hadn’t quite reached to the level that customers would demand, and so they asked me to do further tuning – and so I did. We ultimately polished up the sound quality so that all sections of the company could unreservedly recommend that “this is the AlpineF#1Status sound” before the product went on market. I was truly moved at the fact that everyone in our company had a very meticulous, uncompromising attitude toward the Alpine sound at that final stage. That’s why I love the Alpine brand so much myself.