A Tuscan start.

Audio Analogue is based at Monsummano Terme, in the province of Pistoia in Tuscany. English Wikipedia gives its founding as 1995, and the company’s own history says the idea for its first product took shape that year. That first product was the Vivaldi digital-to-analogue converter, named, like most of its products, after an Italian composer, made in only 25 units; the Puccini integrated amplifier, of 40 watts, was shown as a prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1996 and went into production that summer.

Composers gave it a naming system; Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca, not far from Monsummano. The Puccini SE followed in 1997, the Bellini preamplifier and Donizetti power amplifier in 1998, the Paganini CD player in 1999 and, over the next decade, the Maestro CD of 2000, the Primo, Compositori and Maestro lines of 2003, the Enigma all-in-one, Verdi Settanta and Rossini CD of 2004–05, and the Classe A and Maestro Duecento of 2006.

Its website today calls Claudio Bertini a co-founder, without naming the others. A 1999 factory visit by the online magazine TNT-Audio listed the staff then — S. Blanda as chief executive, G. Blanda in marketing, Bertini as technical manager and owner of a hi-fi shop, Oasi Audio, and the engineers Marco Manunta, formerly of North Star, and G. Rampino — and noted that the original design team, Paoletti and Pratticò, had left. We could not confirm their full names, and the company’s own history does not give them.

Audio Futura and AF Group.

Ownership has changed, as the company’s website footers show. Until 2007 they named Audio Analogue S.r.l., first on Via C. Bottai and from 2006 on Via Maestri del Lavoro; from 2008 Audio Futura, first as an S.r.l. and then as an S.p.A.; and from 2012 AF Group srl, with the line, from 2014, “Audio Analogue is a trademark of AF Group srl.” Today the site says the brands are designed and produced by AF Group, on Via Cesare Battisti in Monsummano Terme. We found no terms or exact dates for those changes.

A second brand appeared in 2013. Airtech, which the company says Bertini created that year, began appearing on Audio Analogue products in 2014, and the Puccini Anniversary of 2015, marking 20 years, was described as the first project from the Airtech laboratories and the brand’s first zero-feedback amplifier.

Its later products include the Maestro Integrato of 2001, the Verdi Cento hybrid of 2008, the Armonia line with the Crescendo in 2009, the Fortissimo and Vivace DAC in 2012 and the ABsolute of 2021, rated at 50 watts in pure Class A or 150 watts in Class AB. The company has also released vinyl records with the guitarist Maurizio Brunod. Its current lines are ABsolute, Anniversary, PureAA and Maestro 2.0, and its website is published in Italian, English, French and German.

Small makers, strong claims.

Italy’s best-known hi-fi brand shows how ownership can travel. Sonus faber was founded in 1983 by Franco Serblin near Vicenza; in 2007 the investment firm Quadrivio bought it and built a group, Fine Sounds, that went on to buy Audio Research, Sumiko and McIntosh, later renaming itself McIntosh Group and moving its headquarters to New York. Fine Sounds had sales of €50 million in 2011; a management buyout with LBO France followed in 2014, the group took the McIntosh name in 2016, and Highlander Partners bought it in 2022. In November 2024 the American company Bose announced that it would buy McIntosh Group, Sonus faber included, according to What Hi-Fi?. Serblin himself had left Sonus faber in 2006, and died in 2013.

Italian audio design also has a longer history. Brionvega, founded in Milan in 1945, worked with designers such as Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper, and its radios and televisions are held by museums including MoMA and the V&A, according to English Wikipedia. It took the Brionvega name in 1963 and was sold to Sèleco in 1992; in 2016 David Bowie’s Brionvega RR 126 radiogram sold at Sotheby’s for £257,000.

That design tradition is collected and exhibited. Brionvega worked with Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Mario Bellini as well as Zanuso and Sapper, won Compasso d’Oro design awards, and has products in the Centre Pompidou and Milan’s ADI Design Museum; in 2025 its pieces appeared in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “The Art of Noise,” according to English Wikipedia. Sonus faber, for its part, is based at Arcugnano, just outside Vicenza.

The makers in this guide are much smaller. They are private companies or partnerships, some still led by their founders, and they describe their own work in strong terms — handmade, entirely Italian, patented. We give each of those claims as the company’s own, and say where we could not check them.

Audio Analogue is one of those makers: a Tuscan brand that has changed owners while keeping its composers’ names.

Black, white and one crimson.

On manufacturing, the company says its products are “designed and made by hand in Italy,” and “designed and made entirely in Italy by small firms and qualified craftsmen,” with a network of local suppliers. Its website around 1999 carried the line “Handcrafted in Italy.” We give those as its statements. We found no staff or revenue figures.

TNT-Audio’s 1999 visit described the then-new Maestro CD player, with 24-bit, 96-kilohertz conversion, at about $2,000, and reported plans for a high-end sister brand called “Stargate”; we found no evidence that it was released.

Its website uses a serif display face for headings, the Raleway and Merriweather typefaces for text, logo files that pair Audio Analogue with Airtech, black and white and a single crimson accent; in 1999 its products came in plain silver or anodised black. For a design guide, Audio Analogue shows how a naming system — Italian composers — can give a small brand a recognisable voice. Compare Opera Loudspeakers, which names its speakers after singers, and Pathos Acoustics. For this guide we use black and the website’s crimson with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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