This Speaker Set Is So Finely-Tuned, It Has an Atomic Clock Inside

The Antelope Audi Rubicon Atomic AD/DA Preamp, which retails for $40,000, is demonstrated during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 7, 2015. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

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By Stephen Pulvirent

January 8, 2015 at 4:54 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

If Dr. No were an audio nerd, the Antelope Rubicon would have had a place of pride in his island lair. The Rubicon is the world’s first AD/DA preamp to house its own atomic clock, and it looks absolutely space age with its vented copper dome and black mirror finish. Yes, it retails for $40,000, and no, you probably don’t need a dose of rubidium-87 for your lossless music files to sound decent. But this doesn’t sound decent, it sounds incredible.

Los Angeles-based Antelope Audio started by making professional audio equipment for the recording industry but eventually moved into the consumer sphere as well, offering the same sound components in more attractive, living-room-friendly packages. The dramatically-named Rubicon is Antelope’s top-of-the-line preamp and it uses an actual 10 MHz rubidium atomic clock as the clocking unit for converting digital signal to analog and vice versa.