(R)Evolutionary Audio - Brion “Fluksus” music-machine 🎶

 

Please read-on, folks: my good friend Marco Minoccheri, always passionate seeker of musical bliss, about 12 months ago and out-of-the-blue,  called me at the phone… his voice was excited to a seldom-experienced degree.

He was (apparently) confused as he was excitedly talking - he who owned among the best Shindo’s, Yamamura’s, Sakuma’s and everything in-between - about an Italian-made “thing” able to make virtually everything: during our first conversation on the matter I was expecting (I swear) to hear something like “… and the coffee this new piece of gear makes really tastes awesome 😀🤩😏🙃😊 !”

This phone-chatting left me berserk: OMG, my poor friend got crazy! He is disavowing the decades of audio research, the mountains of money invested in the best equipment ever built for… a coffee machine 😵‍💫?!?

🥳

Then, after a few days, we met and we reached an hangar-sized workshop where I finally experienced “the coffee machine “, aehm: the Brion Fluksus.

The unassuming, yet elegant Fluksus: its humble, organic appearance is inversely proportional to its sonic and design qualities.

A consideration: just guess “why?” someone should leave not-connected a dreadnought of Yamamura’s Class A amps just to show-up an unknown, underground product… a lunatic, a sage, a saint, maybe?

… or just a sincere music lover, whose choices were, are and will be unaffected by more earthly facts.

It’s all about “quality” as per “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”,  Pirsig’s famous book: the sound is simply The One, cost-no-object… something which let you forget in a blink about 0,0001 % THD and distortion: also if the utmost care was used to optimize final results, the impressive, would dare, unique measures where simply functional to getting the purest sound.

A well-crafted plywood “cube” of sort which didn’t resemble anything else on the market: Marco was like a kid, enthusiastic and his enthusiasm - against my expectations - was going to soon become contagious.

The workshop was the headquarters of the Brion/Fluksus project: the agenda was quite ambitious, to say the least.

Let’s see: an 8 (eight) channel digital amp, a DAC, a preamp with line-stage and MM and MC phono with continuous capacitance control, a streamer, a built-in proprietary DSP and room-tuning (not corrector) directly, real-time talking with the computer via-USB3 and I2S… the fine tuning, I witnessed, is made not using the ubiquitous Pink- or White-Noise but Music!

The powerful latest-generation software and the proprietary ultra-selected integrated-circuits built (no hypes, saw the invoices) by an aerospace-grade industry aren’t a selfish technological exercise of-sort: what I heard that afternoon at the workshop twelve months ago and then, even better at Marco’s place with all the glorious of his world-renowned 7-ways ALE horn-system was an epiphany.

My mind, my music and aesthetic tastes, my 50 years of music and audio experience got such a shot!!!

I tried to resist in my old-school way of thinking, arguing about Class A, DHT and the like… but the “coffee machine” was simply, convincingly sounding like real-music, period.

All the skills of MM’s tech-head were functional and distilled into Fluksus, filtered by Marco’s love for music (he’s a pianist) and - why not - the listening experience accumulated in decades of tireless search for the best sound in the home environment.

Like a premium stove is functional to cooking, but worthless without a good chef, this piece of gears represent to my humble but unbiased ears, the peak of listening pleasure at home… funded, fueled and strongly wanted by someone, Marco Minoccheri, who, like a Zen monk, knew and/or owned most of the sought-after audio goodies made and, after learning a lot, he (humbly) felt ready to make “his very own” statement.

I called this piece of gear (R)Evolutionary because - yes! - I sincerely feel this one-of-a-kind product will be a game-changer: Mark Levinson’s Daniel Hertz is also brewing something in the same vein, but apparently at a cost and lesser in technological content and - indeed - evolutionary approach and extent.

The evolutionary character of Fluksus is about a HUGE powerhouse of digital-domain prowess at the service of Music.

I experienced at Marco’s place a shitty 340bps MP3 file sounding like an RCA Shaded Dog or a Wideband Decca’s… with authority, details, trueness and utmost listening pleasure.

… for the espresso-coffee, well: Marco and his team are still working on the feature 🥳… but what Fluksus brought to the world is a master-built machine in a user-friendly package - touch-controls are soooo sexy 😏 - and a level of refined presentation seldom found everywhere else.

Reportedly, Fluksus will be presented at Munchen Hi-End 2024 to be known by many.

In the meantime, please wait for more down-to-earth details: pricing, availability, web-sites and assorted trivia, about to come.

BTW: just going to enjoy my morning coffee ☕️

😏