Straight outta Scotland! New UK hi-fi brand debuts with a £1K DSP

Colinear Acoustics's DSP is made for both home and professional setups

Angled front view of the Colinear Acoustics DSP-8C on a coloured background
(Image credit: Colinear Acoustics)
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The new, Scottish based hi-fi brand Colinear Acoustics have launched the DSP-8C.

That's designed for professional and audiophile speaker optimisation and room correction.

Where is the home of high-end hi-fi? Fort William in Scotland probably wasn't the first place that jumped to mind, but it's home to a newly formed hi-fi brand that's just launched its first digital signal processor and pre-amp.

Colinear Acoustics were formed in 2024 to offer "high-end, yet affordable, digital audio solutions pioneering the latest innovations and technologies." The DSP-8C is their first product and according to the firm it will "redefine the DSP demands of both domestic and professional environments."

Suggested use cases for the DSP-8C include developing active speakers, optimising professional studio monitors, and room correction in critical listening environments.

Screenshot of the DSPconfig control for the Colinear Acoustics DSP-8C

Colinear's DSPconfig app works on Windows, macOS and Linux.

(Image credit: Colinear Acoustics)

Colinear Acoustics DSP-8C: features and pricing

Colinear have designed the DSP-8C for "advanced room correction, multi-way active crossovers, and speaker/driver alignment in both frequency and time domains." It takes stereo inputs and runs them through algorithms to create eight output channels, each of which can feature frequency response shaping, time domain correction and gain management.

The DSP-8C has coaxial and optical inputs and outputs and eight analogue XLR outputs. Inside there's an eight-channel ES9039SPRO DAC and an output stage based around an optimised OPA1612.

The DSP-8C is controlled by a 1GHz SHARC+ processor with built-in IIR and FIR accelerators promising "unrivalled" DSP performance. The internal DSP sampling rate can be set to either 96 kHz or 192 kHz, delivering up to 348 IIR biquads and over 49,000 combined FIR taps for crossover design, correction and time alignment.

It's all controlled via the DSPconfig app, which is multi-platform across Windows, macOS and Linux and which offers full access to all of the DSP's parameters.

The DSP-8C Founders Edition is available now for £995 (about €1,150 / $1,340 / AU$2,050)

Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).

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