About Us

Rob

For me, making music has never gone further than some amateur flute-playing and taking a few organ lessons. Listening to music, however, went quite far indeed. As a kid, sitting in front of the radio with a tape recorder, delivering newspapers on cold mornings with headphones for an early-model Walkman on my nearly frozen ears, I made a habit out of surrounding myself with music. The first money I ever earned was used to purchase a real Philips stereo ‘tower’, which I then spent many pleasant listening hours with in my bedroom.

Repairing CD players

Every day, on my way to school, I passed a Philips Technical Service Center, which had a truly magical appeal. I ended up working there as an audio service engineer. And, of course, quite a few devices among the higher-order Philips audio series left that building from time to time, winding up in my home, including CD960 CD player and one of the very first Philips car CD players. While CD players were still in their infancy, I already had two! From my car, the original hat shelf was quickly replaced with a serious DIY construction, resulting in many hours of pleasant driving.

Hifi got my interest

Moving to a new home was the excuse my wife needed in order to banish those huge Philips speakers. But before long, a couple of Xanadu speakers and an NAD amplifier replaced them. An accidentally fallen speaker (whoops!) led to an upgrade to MKII. At the same time, I took the opportunity to go fully digital with Sonos and Cambridge CD/DAC). After some growing pains, the music bug has seriously bitten me. Much later, when we found out during our coffee breaks that we shared the same passion for high-end audio, Jos and I started a hobby project, caught Sonos by the horns and, as a result, the first ‘Magna’ streamer was born….the rest, as they say, is history.

Jos

Music has always been central in my life. At the tender age of six, I played flugelhorn, and later I switched to the trombone. I played everything from symphony orchestra music to show bands and musicals. In addition to music, technology has always interested me greatly, and I ended up making that my profession. It was the relationship between electronics and digital technology that especially caught my interest.

Hobby

The ‘audio hobby’ started when I was sixteen years old when my dad gave me a set of audio speakers to renovate. Soon after, there came a homemade DC-coupled FET/transistor amplifier, which were later replaced by two mono tube amplifiers with construction schedules of the firm Klare van Hoorn, which I visited frequently, almost daily. Then one day I got the chance to take over a set of the new full range of Martin Logan (CLS II). I made my own power supply (6000 volts cascade) and my uncle, a furniture craftsman, made the wooden frames.

DIY

Not long after, perhaps because I talked about nothing else, I suddenly had friends, neighbours and acquaintances asking me to build speakers and to assist in selecting a hi-fi set. The latter was a very nice of course, since of course I did not have much money of my own to spend!

Many years later, while the audiophile hobby just getting started, and after I had worked together with Rob for some time, we had our first conversation about audio….a conversation that has continued to the present day. Of course, audio shop talk on its own was not the immediate start of Magna Hifi, but it wasn’t long before talk led to action. These days, Rob and I are full of ideas, and our collaboration is not only innovative, but also fun.