The fabless chip company whose SABRE converters turn ones and zeros into music worth arguing about.
The logo you've never noticed - inside gear you'd never trade. ESS makes no phones, no headphones, no speakers. It makes the one chip that decides how all of them sound.
Here is a fun fact about the audio industry: some of the most obsessively reviewed, endlessly measured, forum-war-inducing products on Earth - $5,000 desktop DACs, $60,000 headphones, studio consoles - are, at their core, a decision about which tiny chip to buy. And an unreasonable share of the time, the answer is a chip from ESS Technology, a fabless semiconductor company in San Jose that most of its customers' customers have never heard of.
This is the strange economics of being a component supplier. ESS doesn't sell you a product you can hold. It sells a digital-to-analog converter - a DAC - that lives soldered inside someone else's box. The DAC's job is deceptively simple to describe and brutally hard to do well: take a stream of digital audio and turn it back into a clean analog voltage that your ear reads as "music," without adding noise, distortion, or timing jitter that a discerning listener will notice.
Almost anyone can move bits. The hard part - the part that separates a $30 dongle from a reference converter - is that last mile back into the analog world. That is the problem ESS has been circling for four decades, and the reason a small design team in Kelowna, British Columbia keeps getting invited to the most expensive rooms in audio.
The flagship, the ES9038PRO, is described - even in the company's own understated framing - as "widely regarded as the best sounding and highest performance DAC on the market today." That is a bold claim in a market that trusts nothing. But ESS backs it the way engineers respect: with numbers. Dynamic range figures in the +130dB range. Distortion so low you need lab equipment to find it. In a skeptical market, receipts beat adjectives.
The result is a brand that lives one layer beneath the consumer. Enthusiasts don't buy "an ESS." They buy an S.M.S.L. desktop DAC, or an LG phone, or a Sennheiser headphone - and then flip the spec sheet to see whose converter is inside. Names like SABRE and HyperStream mean nothing at Best Buy and everything on an audio forum at 2am. That is a moat: the durable kind your customers' customers never quite see.
ESS began in 1983 - not as an audiophile brand, but as Electronic Speech Systems, a startup built to commercialize speech synthesis. Co-founder Forrest Mozer was a space physicist at UC Berkeley; alongside him were Todd Mozer and Joe Costello. Their early chips made machines talk, including voices in Commodore 64 games - the Ghostbusters line "He slimed me!" is ESS lore.
Costello left soon after and went on to help build Cadence Design Systems, one of the giants of chip-design software. ESS, meanwhile, spent the 1990s known for something else entirely: the Audiodrive series of PC sound chips and ESFM synthesizers that shipped in a generation of audio cards.
The turn toward high-end audio came in 2001, when ESS acquired a small Kelowna, British Columbia design house (SAS) led by Martin Mallinson. That team became the R&D engine behind SABRE, and it still designs from Canada's wine country today, with additional operations in Beijing. The SABRE line launched around 2008, and the company has been extending it ever since - into mobile, professional audio, headphone SoCs, soundbars, and most recently, cars.
It is a rare thing for a company to reinvent its product three times - talking toys, PC sound cards, reference converters - while staying obsessed with the same underlying problem: making silicon sound like music. Today ESS is led by President & CEO Dr. Saied Tehrani, with John Marsh as CFO.
Highly integrated 32-bit and 24-bit converters for home theater, A/V receivers, and studio gear. Flagships: ES9038PRO and ES9039PRO.
ESS's patented modulator that pushes timing jitter out of the audible band for a cleaner, more consistent soundstage. Now in its fourth generation.
High-sample-rate, ultra-wide-bandwidth, low-noise analog-to-digital converters for pro audio interfaces, mixing consoles, and mic preamps.
Integrated DAC + amplifier system-on-chip solutions (e.g. ES9219) for phones, USB dongles, and headsets.
Single-chip platforms that fuse SABRE DAC quality with audio decoding and post-processing for soundbars and multimedia speakers.
AEC-Q100 qualified DACs led by the 8-channel ES9039STPRO: +132dB DNR, rated from -40°C to 105°C.
ESS is fabless - it owns no factories. It owns something harder to copy: decades of analog and mixed-signal know-how, a stack of patents, and a design culture built around one hard problem. It designs chips, outsources fabrication to foundries, and sells to OEMs and distributors like Mouser.
Its customers are consumer-electronics, mobile, professional-audio, and automotive makers - a B2B strategy of winning engineers rather than shoppers.
Founded by Forrest Mozer, Todd Mozer, and Joe Costello to commercialize speech synthesis.
ESS becomes widely known for its Audiodrive sound chips and ESFM synthesizers in PC audio cards.
Buys Martin Mallinson's design house, forming the R&D center that would create SABRE.
ESS introduces the SABRE family built on HyperStream modulation, entering high-end audio.
Compact SABRE DACs move into flagship smartphones - headlined by LG's audiophile V-series.
ESS extends into professional audio with SABRE PRO DACs and high-performance ADCs.
Introduces the ES9219 audiophile headphone system-on-chip for mobile devices.
Launches the industry's first high-performance 8-channel SMART DACs (ES9082 / ES9081).
Ships AEC-Q100 automotive DACs led by the +132dB ES9039STPRO for in-dash systems.
If you build audio gear, an ESS SABRE part is the shortcut to reference-grade output: a proven converter with published, defensible numbers that reviewers will scrutinize and (often) praise.
If you're a listener, the payoff is quieter - literally. Lower noise floor, less distortion, tighter imaging. The chip you can't see is the reason the music sounds like it's actually in the room.
ESS's earliest chips made the Commodore 64 talk - including the Ghostbusters line "He slimed me!"
Co-founder Forrest Mozer was a space physicist at UC Berkeley before turning to speech synthesis.
Early co-founder Joe Costello left to help build Cadence Design Systems, an EDA powerhouse.
Sennheiser's HE 1 - one of the priciest headphone systems ever - packs eight ESS DACs inside.
The core SABRE team designs from Kelowna, British Columbia, after ESS bought local firm SAS in 2001.
ESS makes no factories and no finished audio products - only the chip at the heart of everyone else's.
Interviews, teardowns, and product demos featuring ESS SABRE silicon.
Explainers on the SABRE architecture and HyperStream modulation.
▶ Watch YouTube · SearchMeasurement-driven deep dives into the flagship converter.
▶ Watch YouTube · SearchListening tests and teardowns of gear built on the ES9039PRO.
▶ WatchESS is a fabless semiconductor company that designs high-performance audio and analog chips - most notably its SABRE line of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs).
SABRE is ESS's flagship family of 32-bit and 24-bit audio converters, built on the patented HyperStream architecture and used in premium headphones, home-theater gear, studio equipment, phones, and cars.
ESS is headquartered in California (the San Jose / Fremont area) with a key R&D center in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, and operations in Beijing, China.
Consumer and mobile OEMs like LG, premium audio brands like Sennheiser, desktop DAC makers like S.M.S.L., professional studio-equipment makers, soundbar brands, and automotive audio suppliers.
It was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems by UC Berkeley physicist Forrest Mozer, Todd Mozer, and Joe Costello - who later co-founded Cadence Design Systems.