Aurigen has been, and remains, the culmination of many minds working together toward a shared goal. Even so, the project remains the brainchild of one man: our founder and Technical Director, William Funnell-Pilcher.
Bill’s passion for sound reproduction began in the late 1950s. He built his first pair of loudspeakers at age 15 and began working in the Hi-Fi industry in the 1980s. He developed three variants of the Spica TC-50 loudspeaker from New Mexico, USA, for the UK market, one of which was favourably reviewed by Martin Colloms in Stereophile magazine in 1988. He went on to work with Tom Evans Audio Design, breaking into the US market and earning a coveted Golden Ear Award.
Bill is deeply familiar with the sound of live music, having sung bass in a classical S.A.T.B choir for over 30 years. He reads music and has regularly performed alongside piano, pipe organ, and original instrument orchestras.
Despite his successful career in the corporate Hi-Fi world, Bill’s ultimate goal was always to develop a ground-breaking loudspeaker. A major step toward this, although he didn’t know it at the time, was being part of the team at Pioneer UK, developing an affordable system with high-end aspirations. The Precision range included a remarkable single aluminum drive unit bookshelf loudspeaker, finished in various flocked finishes. Thanks to a connection with Walt Disney, a Dalmatian dog-themed speaker even made it onto the front cover of Hi-Fi News and Record Review in 1996.
This journey led to 2018, when, after meeting Martin Colloms at a London Hi-Fi show, William and his wife Lori moved from Surrey to the Isle of Wight to focus on developing the Aurigen Sound Projector which Bill had commenced in 2010, followed by the Ultra-Litz Cable in 2020.
Three European patents, new technology and Ultra-Litz Field Cable bring a fundamentally new and better way to hear sound at home. His collaboration of over four years with creative director Lori Funnell has taken the product in a direction completely undreamt of at the beginning, by bringing environmentally friendly materials and a standard of look, style and finish that goes well beyond our competitors.
We accept that Aurigen is elitist and expensive but so was Concorde and before that the Spitfire. They, like us, defined a massive move forward in performance and technology. Machined and handcrafted from solid bamboo. Designed and engineered to solve problems that had held back sonic capability for decades.
William Eikos are excited to announce the launch of the Ultra-Litz Field Cable.
Their genesis comes from the R&D on the Aurigen loudspeaker. As even the best cable Bill was using was creating a performance ceiling restricting the capabilities of even the prototype loudspeakers.
What Bill failed to realise during the creation of the Field Cable was the massive paradigm shift in technology and performance he had made.
Bill finally realised that the felt construction was not only a superior electrical insulator but other important factors were at play.
Vibration is now recognised as the new enemy in high-end systems, it diminishes the ability to resolve micro-details from recordings, vital to making them sound real.
Handcrafted in eco-friendly wool felt our cable construction brings broadband vibration control and damping at levels previously unachievable using petrochemicals.
It became obvious that having dealt with the vibrations within the cable a solution was required to perform the same function within the plugs.
Sockit to Me was designed to do exactly that. Sockit it to Me will reveal details like air and space around instruments and a larger soundstage. Decay of notes and the spaces between notes will become more evident as the overall noise floor is lowered revealing tiny spatial cues and what we call the sound of silence.
"These attributes are astonishing. The cable just set a new standard for dynamics that is unambiguous, micro and macro as well as three dimensionality and focus. And by a smaller but significant margin a new transparency standard. Incredible"