About Us

AAW is a boutique audiophile design company located in Austin, Texas, USA, the live music capital of the world. In 2015, we began developing our ideas and principles, circulating prototypes and exploratory hardware among local listeners for critiques and reviews. Input from many experienced listeners helped us to improve our products’ sound quality and user-friendliness. Add in continual, relentless refinement, and you’ve got The Black Swan and The Black Amp. We won’t say they’re perfect, because nothing is—but we’re pretty happy with the way they’ve turned out.

Our technologies blend contemporary physics —no, really—with the best practices in circuit design and layout discovered and developed over half a century.

Barry Thornton

AAW’s founder has been active in the audio design community for over 70 years—Barry prefers “experienced” to “old”. He started out in the 1950s, modifying existing products from Heathkit and EICO, and went on to design and build touring sound systems for Jethro Tull and many other bands. He created the Quintessence Audio Group products in the ‘70s and ‘80s, lost the company in a divorce, then developed products for SAE, Parasound, QED, Adcom, Audionics of Oregon, and Hegeman. From there, Barry created products for Monster Cable in the mid-’80s, and in the early ‘90s developed digital audio technologies for the entertainment industry.  In the mid-’90s he created ClearCube, pioneering development of the blade computer, along with virtualization hardware and software. Throughout this journey he has collected 34 patents , done a lot of presentations and some teaching.  His protracted university education had majors in physics, cultural anthropology, and maintaining a 2S deferment.  He has been a serial entrepreneur, had no real career path and has been referred to as a “techno-whore’.

After his first retirement, Barry created Austin Medical Research and spent 10 years developing  pain-reduction technology. After his second retirement, Barry returned to his love of audio technologies, creating Austin Audio Works. In 2015 he evolved to a new way of looking at audio technology, exploring current domain signal processing, rather than the more-common voltage domain—laying the foundation for current AAW products.