INTERVIEW: EELCO GRIMM, GRIMM AUDIO
EELCO GRIMM
I came across Grimm Audio and its founder, Eelco Grimm, in my review of the Grimm Audio MU1 streamer, a state-of-the-art component. As I wrote in my review of the MU1:
“A Roon Core and streamer of the highest caliber with extreme transparency and resolving capabilities, an almost preternatural ability to render as if analog, which translates to a natural, wholly engaging, and beautifully musical experience.”
This stoked great interest in learning more about Eelco Grimm, though I wanted to leave the technology behind and learn more about Eelco, from a life perspective. The interview turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated, very personal, and very informative.
KE HEARTSONG: Where are you from? How was it growing up as a child?
EELCO GRIMM: I was raised in the southern province of The Netherlands called “Noord Brabant” where Grimm Audio is now also based. We moved often between towns in the south since my father was in the Dutch Air Forces as a fighter pilot [see picture], and during his service between the 50’s and 80’s pilots typically were moved from squadron to squadron regularly. There were four military airports in Noord Brabant and my father has been stationed at all of them. During my high school days I lived in Waalwijk, quite an average working-class town, but close to a wonderful nature reserve. I did enjoy myself, but when I was 17 in the mid eighties and moved to Delft technical university to study electronics, it felt like ‘coming home’. I really love to have architecture from many centuries around me, plus a lively vibe of students, artists and diverse other people. I moved from Delft to Utrecht in 1993 and that’s a city that carries this atmosphere in spades.
KEH: Was there music in your home? Record Player? CD player? If not how do you think that affected you? How did music affect your early life? Was there a family member or sibling or another person, who inspired your love for music (art, aesthetics, design) and/or audio?
EG: First, and likely most important, there was live music. My mother and I played piano (classical music and some basic boogie woogie). My father played various recorder flutes and my younger brother played guitar. He soon turned to electric guitar and I started to build his amps, so I had a goal for my electronics hobby. Both my parents came from families where everyone played an instrument. My grandfather of father’s side played violin and conducted several choirs. He did so already in Indonesia where he worked as a teacher from 1916 till 1935 (and where my father was born in 1930). I continue this tradition, singing temor in a classical 25 people choir. A true highlight every week.
My parents were also highly interested in music playback, from their youngster days. After the second world war, my father had become crazy about US jazz and he collected 78 rpm jazz records from George Shearing quintet, Gordon Jenkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Artie Shaw, etc (I have them now, and intend to buy a proper cartridge to play them). In the early 50’s my mother worked for a national Dutch radio broadcaster and with some discount she bought a truly high end tube radio: a Philips Bi-ampli [see picture]. That was already before she met my father.
Later in the 70’s my father bought Infinity (SM152?) speakers, a Pioneer SX-880 receiver, a Technics turntable (SL1610?) and an Aiwa cassette recorder. Quite a serious system for that time. As a kid I was not allowed to play with this set, although I soon knew better than my dad how everything worked…
I am certain that all this love for quality music playback around me has had its influence on my future. And the same is true for design furniture and art (my grandfather on mothers’ side was a tailor and collected paintings - he often traded a hand made jacket for a painting with painters from the Laren school).
KEH: What was your very first system then? How did you listen, in terms of Digital or Analog? How did it make you feel, think?
EG: I mostly listened to radio and cassettes. My first radio was the old Erres tube radio of my father [see picture]. Since it did not receive FM I changed to a solid state FM tuner, connected to the first amplifier I built myself (I guess I was 13 years old). In the late 70’s and 80’s cassette tapes were the main source of music for young people on a limited budget like me. I taped LP’s of my elder brother and made mix tapes from radio programs, annoying my family during dinner when my favorite radio program was broadcasted… CD was introduced around the time I moved to Delft. I remember listening to a CD player in a hifi shop in 1983 but I was not overly impressed. Besides, I could not afford it.
KEH: What musicians did you admire then, enjoy, love as a young man? Why? And your most memorable epiphany that has come from listening to music or turning a good friend or a significant other on to music?
EG: I have a vivid memory of music we played in the car when we went on holidays as a child. Two tapes were played time and time again so they are strongly connected to a holiday feeling: Sounds of Silence of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and a compilation album of famous Dutch 60’s singer Boudewijn de Groot. I still love those records.
My elder brother Peter had a large influence on my musical taste when I was young. He is ten years older than me and had a good collection of great 70’s albums that I loved and love, like Emerson Lake and Palmer, Pictures at an Exhibition; Rush, Hemispheres; Supertramp, Crime of the Century and Crosby Stills and Nash, CSN.
When I moved to Delft to study I joined a group of students who formed a new wave band. I became their sound engineer and we hang out together regularly - even more when three of the band members went to live in the same house. We played Kate Bush, Hounds of Love; Prefab Sprout, Steve McQueen; Simple Minds, New Gold Dream; Tears for Fears, Songs from the Big Chair, Japan, Tin Drum, etc and had a lot of fun. We went on holidays to Greece in an old Ford Transit and one night slept on a beach surrounded by cliffs, playing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on our getto blaster. That’s quite a memory.
Apart from music playback, live concerts have been very influential on me. Perhaps my most impressive concert has been Rock Werchter (Belgium) in 1987 with still just one stage and on that an incredible line up of Iggy Pop, Echo and the Bunnymen, Pretenders, Eurythmics en Peter Gabriel. It was like continuous musical ecstasy, all of them played so good.
In 1987 I switched studies and went to the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, studying Sonology (contemporary electronic music) and Music Registration. One year later John Cage was artist in residence for two weeks and a wonderful theatrical performance of his piece ‘Inlets’ made a huge impression on me. Around that time I started to visit classical and jazz concerts more frequently, which was often enlightening. I remember going to a Bach St. Matthew Passion in Rotterdam. I brought the score and read the piece during the concert, which was a next level experience. Also memorable was the first time I went to a Mahler symphony concert in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The bass of the big drum in that hall was as from another world!
Live pop concerts that I have fond memories of are for instance by Dutch artist Fay Lovsky in the Utrecht concert hall Vredenburg, Paco de Lucia in Palau de la Musica, Barcelona and Gillian Welch in Paradiso, Amsterdam (she even got the people at the bar to shut up…).
And dancing. I enjoyed ballroom dancing in my teenage years, and went to dance Tango in my thirties. A few years ago I shifted to Cuban style Salsa with my girlfriend and we dance every week, which is a great joy. Of course I now have a special love for tango and salsa music. As you can imagine, since dancing is in my blood, I’ve also gone to some crazy good dance parties. I’m not so much into EDM nights (I need swing to dance), but I had the luck to live for a decade in large house where my 15 house mates and me regularly threw big parties with 100 visitors or so, dancing intensely on B52’s, George Michael, James Brown, Prince, Fat Boy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Urban Dance Squad, etc.
Last but not least, once high end audio came into my life there were some wonderfully great experiences during audio show demos, notably those of John van der Sluis of the underground hifi magazine Audio & Techniek (later more) and Ed de Jong of Audio Note. They played Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday and it was enchanting. Most dear to me are my visits to my friend Peter van Willenswaard in Rotterdam. He had a crazy good audio system based on vintage 1946 Vortexion (military) amplifiers and Quad ESL57’s, with subwoofers and a tube phono pre of his own design. We played Gilbert & Sullivan and other jaw dropping 50’s Decca records. And French chansons of Jacques Brel, Leo Ferrer, Barbara. I have never experienced any audio playback that was so deeply emotionally touching as that. It still is my reference for what we strive for at Grimm Audio.
KEH: What catalyzing event put you on the road to high-end audio?
EG: When I moved to Delft in 1984 for studies, I joined student association DSB. One year later I made friends with a new novice at DSB, Menno Spijker, who gave me his collection of “Audio & Techniek” magazines to read. Audio & Techniek was founded in 1982 by John van der Sluis and Peter van Willenswaard, and published comparative equipment tests with lots of measurements, plus DIY designs and reflections on audio and technology in general. It was a platform for many authors, but the articles of Peter van Willenswaard caught my immediate attention. Peter took the reader with him on his adventurous discovery journey into high end sound with tube amplifiers. It was written so pure and honest, and resonated so well with my personal drive that I could not stop reading and after a sleepless night I had become a dedicated audiophile. Music and its sound can lead one to a deep emotional core in the soul and it turned out that the electronics of an audio system could keep you at a distance of that core or invite you to go even deeper. For me this seemed like a fundamental aspect of life.
Soon I contacted John van der Sluis and became one of the regular visitors at his office. This is where I also met Guido Tent. At a local electronics store I found a Thorens TD124 for almost free, I bought a phono amp kit from Audio & Techniek and some prototype speakers of Peter. I modified an old Philips stereo tube amp following concepts from the magazine, and my personal journey had started.
KEH: How did Grimm Audio begin and what were the initial motivations?
EG: I had an interest in professional sound engineering already as a teenager and when I learned in Peter’s articles about the impact that audio electronics had on the music experience I knew that I would dedicate my life to bring that knowledge to the recording industry. It felt as if an important aspect of sound reproduction got lost after the 60’s and with digital audio we were drifting away even further.
After my study at the Conservatory I did another audio engineering course about broadcast audio, in ‘media city’ Hilversum. At the graduation party in 1991 I met audio journalist and publisher Hans Beekhuyzen who founded ‘Pro Audio Magazine’ in 1989, together with Peter van Willenswaard (I was their very first subscriber). Hans offered me a job and I worked for him as an editor for 9 years. This is when I moved to Utrecht, where the magazine was based. Peter taught me about measuring and listening and we became friends. In 1997 I started my own recording company, Fairytapes. I managed to buy a few Schoeps tube microphones and I asked Peter and Guido to help me build custom tube studio equipment like mic pre’s, shunt regulated tube mic power supplies, a mixing desk and an AD converter. To have more time for Fairytapes, I quit at the magazine in 2000 and applied for a job as lecturer at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (1 day a week).
In 2003 Guido, Peter and I were working on an AD converter and noticed that a certain Bruno Putzeys of Philips would give a talk about the design of a discrete Analog to Digital converter at the Amsterdam AES Convention. Peter and I went there, were blown away by his presentation, asked him after the talk if he was willing to license his design to us and he timidly asked if he could perhaps join us. Soon we decided to found a company with the four of us, we developed the AD1 and “the rest is history” as they say.
KEH: Biggest mistake you ever made, personally and then with Grimm Audio? And what did you learn from it?
EG: December 3rd 1999 I conducted a massive test of 18 tube vocal mics for Pro Audio Magazine. I had already measured them in the anechoic chamber of the technical university in Delft and that day I would make recordings of a male and female singer in a studio of the conservatory in The Hague. All went well, but of course I had underestimated the amount of time this would cost. As a result I came back home too late to catch the train to Nijmegen where my younger brother celebrated his 30th birthday with a smashing party full of musician friends of his. It was one of his most memorable parties, and that said something. Two years later he died totally unexpectedly of sepsis after a throat infection and there would never be a chance to celebrate a party with him anymore.
With Grimm Audio there were no mistakes of that level but I do regret that we did not focus on making a more commercially viable redesign of the AD1 with PCM outputs in stead of just DSD. The reason was that we got seriously distracted from that by the urge to develop the LS1. I still think that a more universal and producible AD1 redesign would have done us and the audio world a big favor. The LS1 could have waited for a while.
The lesson learned both times is that if one stacks too many wishes on top of each other, reality makes choices for you and this may not always be your personal choice. On the other hand, the LS1 is a unique achievement and it was essential for our development. I accept without hesitation the way it went.
KEH: What do you believe sets Grimm Audio apart from the other high-end audio manufacturers?
EG: Grimm Audio’s mission is to set new audio frontiers by making the full music chain more transparent. So we do not limit ourself to a certain component, we have a holistic approach to audio and are prepared to design any element of the chain, both in pro audio and in hifi.
We believe in stepping out of the way of the signal where possible and treat the remaining path with extreme precision. So we don't apply any more processing than strictly necessary (both in the analog and digital domain). Note that sometimes this can lead to very complicated circuitry or software, but the goal is always to minimize the impact of the equipment on the signal path. We measure this impact with high performance measurement equipment (sometimes home grown, like our jitter analyser). And we listen. Our goal is that the chain becomes transparent both in a technical sense and for the musical emotion. The people in our team have huge experience with what matters in audio and how to achieve transparency in electronic and software design.
KEH: What is Grimm Audio’s driving philosophy, its goals, plans for the future?
EG: I should cite our mission statement to answer this question:
“Grimm Audio is driven to improve the audio experience. We are convinced that audio playback quality can be improved by striving for perceptual neutrality, using a scientific approach and a healthy amount of curiosity. With this insight, our team builds an entire audio chain, ‘from sound to sound’. Our audio equipment delivers an optimal user experience and total clarity in the presentation of music. Customers of Grimm Audio are music lovers and sound engineering professionals who want to rely on this total clarity, since it offers them the possibility to create or experience the message of the artist in such a way that the listener is deeply touched.”
On our road map for the upcoming year(s) are first of all further integrations in the MU1 of network services such as UPnP and Tidal Connect. Secondly, we are rewriting the LS1 firmware, which will be a free update for all LS1 customers. Most of our development time at the moment goes into the MU2. That is a sister product of the MU1 with built-in discrete DAC and analog pre amp. The MU1 is for people with a 3rd party DAC or an active loudspeaker system such as the LS1. The MU2 is for those who love full integration but prefer to keep their loudspeakers and amps. Another product under development is a phono stage, designed by Peter van Willenswaard. And finally we will introduce a multichannel AD converter with fpga downsampling and ‘Audio over IP’ interface - we won’t forget our pro audio heritage.
KEH: Okay. What is your current reference system or your best high-end system of all time? Why? And how do you listen?
GRIMM AUDIO MU1
EG: It is (perhaps unsurprisingly) the MU1 and LS1. The reason is that especially loudspeakers are such difficult devices to design: the cabinet acoustics, the drivers, crossover, low frequency room issues, etc. all need attention and often demand contradictory solutions. In my ears the LS1 is still the best compromise. Well designed passive speakers can offer a very high emotional transparency, but I have become addicted to the neutrality of the LS1 that is next to impossible to achieve with a passive system. And we have come a long way with emotional transparency in the LS1. The system sounds ‘musical’ as our customer say.
GRIMM AUDIO LS1
In my modest sized living room the LS1’s are placed quite close to the wall. Due to their wide baffle they work very well near a wall and can be used with great success in small rooms as well as (very) large ones. So I am a happy consumer of our own system…
GUIDO & EELCO
You are teaching at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Music and Technology. It seems like quite the impressive university and that it embraces art, beautiful. As you can tell from our magazine, art is very important to me. Your bio on the Grimm Audio website says that Eelco “Lives for sound, music, and art in general.” What does that mean for you? What are your five favorite albums and five favorite movies of all time and why? And art?
EG: Music
Five abums! Impossible! As hopefully is clear by now, I have a very wide taste and love every genre as long as it is executed with passion and mastery. I will mention some albums that are dear to me for various reasons, but it’s more than five. In no particular order:
Bjork, Vespertine
Paul Simon, Graceland
Peter Gabriel, So
U2, Achtung Baby
Police, Regatta de Blanc
Jeff Buckley, Grace
Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
Nick Cave, Push the Sky Away
Laurie Anderson & Brian Eno, Bright Red
Talk Talk, Laughing Stock
The Eurithmics, Be as you are tonight
The Pretenders, Learning to crawl
Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine
Youn Sun Nah, Same Girl
Orchestra Baobap, Specialist in all styles
Mariza, Fado Em Mim
And some wonderful artists in general: Jacques Brel, Billie Holiday, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, The Beatles, k.d. Lang, Kate Bush, …
Some dear albums of Dutch artists in Dutch:
Doe Maar, Doris Day en andere stukken
Maarten van Roozendaal, Adem Uit
Frédériqe Spigt, Engel
Nynke Laverman, Plant
And of course classical!
Bach (St Matthew Passion), Purcell (‘Mark how readily each pliant string’), Mahler (Kindertotenlieder), Stravinsky (Sacre du Printemps ), Schubert (Sonata in A, Winterreise), Shostakovitch (Chamber Symphony C minor). Special artists: Janine Jansen, Maria Joao Pires, Barbara Hannigan, …. I should stop. I can mention many more artists, but it would still feel limited. And please note that none of these albums and artists were selected for their high end sonic qualities. For me music always comes first.
Movies
Another very tricky one. Just five!?
The Singing Detective - Jon Amiel (BBC TV series)
La Grande Bellezza - Paolo Sorrentino
Le Tout Nouveau Testament - Jaco van Dormael
Parasite - Bong Joon-ho
Birdman - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius
Kubrick, Fellini, Lars von Trier, Chaplin, …
I need to stop, this list is also way too long, I did not even start.
Art
Even more difficult! If I just think of painting, there’s of course the great Dutch painters Jan van Eijck, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Mondriaan. But of course there’s many more great painters I love: Holbein, Dürer, Klee, Klimt, Schiele, Turner, Monet, Matisse, Da Vinci, Carravaggio, Rothko, and so on and so forth. It is endless, and this is just painters. I can’t choose. And what about photographers (Van der Elsken), sculpturers (Brancusi), architects (Dudok, the Hilversum town hall…!), novelists, poets, and then we should go to the theatre, to fashion, etc.
The essence for me is not to focus on ‘the greatest artist’ or so, but to experience art in all its forms, nuances and qualities on a regular basis. I see art as the most important way of communication between people who are set apart in place and time. It offers beauty and relief. And maybe more important even, it inspires by showing unexpected views on life and our inner world.
Is there anything that I’ve not covered, that you’d like to share or address concerning Grimm Audio? You?
EG: Perhaps worth to mention is the crazy coincidence that the new and wonderful premises of Grimm Audio are situated right on the spot where my father parked his F84F Thunderstreak jet planes when he was based in Eindhoven Airport in the 60’s, around the time my mother got pregnant of me.
Eelco, thank you for your time and this interview, much appreciated. I wish you and Grimm Audio all the best!
GRIMM AUDIO
AKRM