Mola-Mola Tambaqui

Adding Roon-ready capability to its highly customised DAC has given this curiously-named Dutch company another highly intriguing device. Nothing fishy here!

- Andrew Everard

For an insight into the digital audio product we have before us, the £8999 Mola-Mola Tambaqui, I turn to no less an authority than biologist, author and TV presenter Jeremy Wade, best-known for his series River Monsters and Dark Waters, in which he goes in search of – and catches – some of the world’s largest and most predatory fish.

There, in a YouTube video entitled The Terrifying Tambaqui, he cradles in his arms the fish itself, which he has just hooked by accident while angling for an entirely different species in a South American river. He explains to the camera that this giant-sized member of the piranha family, while replacing that creature’s needle-sharp teeth with a mouthful of grinding stumps, is one of the most powerful denizens of the deep he has ever caught.

So there’s the backstory to the name of this DAC/headphone amp, from the also piscatorially-monickered Mola-Mola. Why all the fishy stuff? Well, the explanation goes that the sunfish logo and name – the scientific one for that creature – came from an industrial design consultancy in the early days of the company. But while founder Bruno Putzeys, of Class D/Hypex fame, liked those, he wasn’t too sold on their ideas for the casework design, and decided to do the styling himself. Clients, eh?

GOING FISHING

Putzeys’ original idea was also to call the first products ‘Preamp’ and ‘Power amp’, but his Japanese distributor wanted model names, ‘So I went through Wikipedia hunting for interesting names. You wouldn’t believe how boring and prosaic most fish names are: it took two days to find Kaluga (a type of sturgeon) [for the power amps] and Maku’a (Hawaiian for ‘Mola mola’ – I subsequently dropped the glottal stop) [for the preamp].’