AESTHETIX AUDIO MIMAS
White pointed first to its
fully balanced volume
control, which com-
prises 60 individually
switched resistors that
permit volume adjust-
ment in increments of
1dB. “When you see
0.5dB or even finer
resolutions, that usually
means it’s an [integrated
circuit],” White replied.
“I’m not saying that all
ICs necessarily sound
bad, but in comparison
to individual resistors,
they do. As for traditional
potentiometers, they have a particular sound characteristic
depending upon the kind of material used, and they don’t
track well. When you go down to the lower ranges, where
most people listen to music, they track very poorly. What
I mean by tracking is the channel-to-channel balance. A
balanced potentiometer greatly affects the operation of the
balanced circuitry. So, for me, the priority in preamps is vol-
ume control, volume control, volume control. And preamps
are a little bit what I’m known for, because those were our
first products.” This left me eager to discover whether 1dB
volume increments would be too large. Would some record-
ings always seem either too loud or too soft?
White stressed that the Mimas has a fully differential, tubed
gain stage. The output stage has no global feedback or servoand tubed preamp sections
combine the functionality
of his Atlas power amplifier
($8000) and Calypso line
stage ($5000) in a single,
44-lb package costing $7000
in its basic configuration.
The name of this and other
Aesthetix models sprang from
a Monopoly-like game called
Solar Quest that White’s
family used to play. The game
involves flying around our
solar system on each planet’s
moons. White had memo-
rized the names of those
moons—Atlas, Calypso, and
Mimas all orbit Saturn—and thought they’d make great
product names. He spoke to me about the Mimas by phone.
“Our goal with the Mimas was to not sacrifice our core
values whatsoever as we brought the technologies that are
in our more expensive separates into an integrated,” White
told me. “The power section is a zero-feedback, DC-
coupled, balanced, bridged design. We retained the volume
control from the Calypso line stage and the whole gain-
stage structure. The output stage is very similar to what’s
in the Atlas. The essence of what is in the other products is
in the Mimas. It’s not like we made the parts cheaper. The
circuitry and parts are identical. All of the cost savings is that
it’s in one chassis.”
Asked what he considers most special about the Mimas,