Two friends, a lawyer and a folded strip of foil.

Piega began in 1986 as a garage business. The company’s own history, published in 2019, says the loudspeakers were first assembled by day in Leo Greiner’s garage and driven at night in Kurt Scheuch’s estate car to a store, and that the two men set up today’s PIEGA SA that year together with Christian Schmid, whom it describes as a lawyer and music lover. German Wikipedia, citing a company portrait published by the German distributor in-akustik, also names all three as founders; several trade reports name only Greiner and Scheuch, so the third founder is easy to miss.

The company describes the two partners as complements: Scheuch as the man obsessed with sound, Greiner as the one with an eye for design — one of its own pages calls him the sales talent instead. In the same year they hired their first employee, Aldo Ballabio, who the company says was, after Scheuch, its ribbon specialist; his son Mario joined in 1996 and still builds the ribbons today, according to a company profile.

The first models had Italian names — Arlecchino, Capriccio, Arabella and Elektra, the last two taken from operas by Richard Strauss, the company says. All carried a ribbon tweeter from the start and cost between 2,000 and 8,000 Swiss francs a pair, sold directly to dealers by the founders. The company says Scheuch then spent more than 15 years on the road alone building its dealer network while Greiner ran the growing workshop.

The name comes from the Italian piega, “fold,” a reference to the folding of the thin aluminium foil in its ribbon tweeters, German Wikipedia says, citing the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of April 2012. In 1991 the business moved out of the garage to the production site in Horgen, on the western shore of Lake Zurich, where it still is; a second workshop at Wädenswil, a few kilometres along the lake, was added later. Some trade reports say Piega was founded in Horgen; the company’s own account places Horgen five years after the start.

The ribbon and the aluminium box.

Piega’s identity rests on one component. Its ribbon tweeter uses a membrane of thin aluminium foil measuring 26 × 42 mm, with a moving mass of about seven milligrams — around 30 times lighter than the lightest ordinary dome tweeters, according to German Wikipedia and the company. It is driven by a neodymium magnet and magnet bars in the front plate, which the company says act like magnetic lenses and give a sensitivity of more than 100 dB. Its later coaxial ribbon, which places midrange and treble in one driver, takes about 30 working steps to make, the company says, and it describes the people who make it as perhaps the only two such jobs in the world — a claim we give as its own.

The second signature is the cabinet. In 1997 Piega began making its loudspeaker bodies from extruded aluminium, and most models since have used it, German Wikipedia says, noting that entry-level Classic models use MDF. The company recalls that high-end listeners first dismissed the aluminium boxes as “design speakers.” Their plain styling, it says, came from the Swiss designers Hannes Wettstein and Stephan Hürlemann.

Larger projects followed. In 2009 the Master One combined the coaxial ribbon with a dipole design — a world first, German Wikipedia says — and in 2013 the Master Line Source applied the line-source principle, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described in November 2013. Since 2019 Piega has also made wireless active speakers. The current range runs from the Classic and Premium lines to the Coax series.

The company lists a long run of awards on its website, including Golden Ear awards from The Absolute Sound for the Coax 711 in 2018, Stereo Sound Grand Prix awards in Japan for the Coax 711 in 2017, the Master Line Source 3 in 2019 and the Coax 811 in 2023, a Product of the Year title from The Absolute Sound for the Coax 611 in 2025 and a hi-fi+ award for the same model in 2026. We give these as listed by the company and have not checked each one with the magazines.

Swiss and Austrian hi-fi.

Switzerland’s audio reputation was built largely on professional machines. Stefan Kudelski made the first Nagra tape recorder in 1951, and it became the standard for film sound from the 1960s to the 1990s, English Wikipedia says; the brand now belongs to Audio Technology Switzerland, near Lausanne. Willi Studer founded Studer in Zurich in 1948 and registered the Revox name for consumer equipment in 1951. Thorens is older still: it was registered at Sainte-Croix, in Vaud, in 1883.

Austria’s record centres on Vienna. AKG was founded there in the late 1940s by Rudolf Görike and Ernst Pless; its owner, Harman, closed its Vienna operations in 2017. Pro-Ject, founded by Heinz Lichtenegger in 1991, designs its turntables at Mistelbach, in Lower Austria, and makes them in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany.

Vienna is now the trade’s meeting place too. In September 2024 the High End Society announced that its HIGH END show would leave Munich after 2025, StereoNET reported; the first Vienna edition was held at the Austria Center Vienna from 4 to 7 June 2026.

According to their own websites, Goldmund is at Satigny and darTZeel at Vessy, both in the canton of Geneva; CH Precision is at Préverenges, near Lausanne; Soulution’s maker, Spemot, is at Dulliken, in the canton of Solothurn; Piega is at Horgen, on Lake Zurich; Revox, Swiss by origin, is now run from Villingen-Schwenningen in Germany; and Vienna Acoustics is at Weigelsdorf, south of Vienna.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a family company.

Unlike many hi-fi names, Piega has not been sold. The company calls itself a family business, and we found no acquisition by an outside owner in the sources we checked. In early 2018 management passed to the second generation, Alexander Greiner and Manuel Greiner, Leo Greiner’s sons, the company and German Wikipedia say; the German magazine FIDELITY, visiting Horgen in February 2023, described them as running the commercial and sales sides, and the company’s awards page calls Manuel Greiner its chief executive. Its legal notice gives the company as PIEGA SA, Bahnhofstrasse 29, Horgen.

The company says its loudspeakers are handmade in its two workshops on Lake Zurich and that it has produced in Switzerland since it was founded; it also says it is Switzerland’s leading loudspeaker maker and exports to more than 40 countries. We give those as its claims. FIDELITY reported in 2023 that the ribbon tweeters and aluminium enclosures are made in-house, and the company publishes ISO 9001 quality certificates dated May 2024.

Its newest venture is in distribution. On 1 May 2024 a joint venture called rose x PIEGA, formed with the South Korean streaming-electronics brand HiFi Rose, began distributing HiFi Rose products in Germany and other European markets, with Alexander and Manuel Greiner and Sean Kim as managing directors, likehifi and EtNow reported in April 2024. How the venture is owned was not stated.

For a design guide, Piega shows how a single technical idea — a folded strip of foil — can give a company its name, its look and its story. Compare Vienna Acoustics, another family-run loudspeaker maker in this round, and Weiss, another Swiss audio firm. For this guide we use graphite, anodised silver and a deep lake blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Piega’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.