A week ago, the focus here was on the professional career of the darTZeel founder and the circuitry features of his patented output stage. This week, we will discuss the company's employees, upcoming new devices, the special darTZeel 50-Ohm connection and Hervé Delétraz's musical preferences.

Dirk Sommer: Since when have you been able to make a living from your hi-fi company?
Hervé Delétraz: Only very recently! From about 2010, it took quite a long time before I was able to make a living from it. In 2010, I was able to give up my other job. But it's still difficult. You really have to be passionate about it. Otherwise, I would have given up many times because it wasn't that easy. But I love it, so I'm not going to stop. You know, it's getting easier to make a living out of it now.

DS: How many employees do you have today?
S2: Today we are nine in the area you visited, plus the guys from PRO, the reintegration company who do the pre assembly (“PRO: Entreprise Sociale Privée d'Intégration et de Réinsertion Professionnelle" is a foundation, that also owns the building where darTZeel is located. ds) They are between two and six. It depends on our needs. Not all the nine employees have a full time job, some work part-time. For example, the engineers in R&D department work 60 or 80 percent because I like to give the people some freedom. When they are more relaxed they simply work better. I don't want to stress them. The results are much better when they are not stressed. We now concentrate everything in the facility where you were today. Before we also did some R&D at a place further away. But it wasn't so easy to archieve good synergy when you couldn't talk to your engineer directly. Spontaneous solutions are not possible when you are 100 kilometers away. Because it's too complicated. When colleagues the in U.S. or in other countries are 1000 or 2000 kilometers apart, it's not easy to create a design that you can be sure is your baby. I want to have something that pleases me first and I hope that it will please the others too. So far it's beenokay. I hope that I will be able to continue this way.