Even before the High End, I had planned to review darTZeel's NHB-18S and NHB-108 pre/end amplifier combination. In the showroom, I asked company founder Hervé Delétraz about the technical details of his creations. He suggested that we talk about it in detail at the company headquarters and in his private listening room near Geneva.

In the first half of July, the time had come: we visited darTZeel in Plan-les-Ouates. The company is based there in a spacious building complex owned by a foundation, whose employees also carry out some of the production for the high-end company. But you can find out more about this directly from Hervé Delétraz, who proved to be pleasantly open and willing to provide information in the following interview - regardless of whether it was about constructive solutions for his electronics or details of his CV. I find his comments so fascinating that I have decided to present them to you virtually unedited and unabridged but in two parts due to their length. But before we start with the first part, you should know that the company name darTZeel is an artificial word that Hervé Delétraz made up from the letters of his surname, an anagram. There is probably no better way to document the developer's attachment to his product.

Dirk Sommer: How did you come to HiFi? Normalerweise sagt fast kein Firmeninhaber oder Entwickler, dass er geplant habe, in der HiFi-Branche zu arbeiten. Sie kamen mehr oder weniger zufällig dorthin. Wie ist Deine Geschichte?
Hervé Delétraz: I was born in 1962. In the mid 70s you didn't have a lot of leisure activities only music und cinema, no telephone, no internet whatever. So I like to play some music. I first started by listening to the radio. My parents had a Philips tube radio with an old turntable, and I was listening not to music at the beginning, but some stories on vinyl. There were some stories like fairytales or whatever. I liked this. And one day I decided to to remove the radio that was inside a piece of furniture. So I removed it and I put it in my bedroom, and started to to listen to the radio. At that time you had the long wave radio statios like France Inter and Europe 1. In the night there were programms with very nice music. And they were talking about the music and the musician and they already talk about jazz at the time. But I didn't like it so much because it was new for me. But I've got used to listening to this music.