Two friends, a private house and a speaker called Tempo.

Audio Physic was founded in 1985 by Joachim Gerhard and Wilhelm Hegener, according to the company’s own history. It says the two met in the 1970s at a discotheque in Korbach, in northern Hesse, built loudspeakers as hobbyists and compared equipment in the hi-fi studio Hegener ran in Bestwig, in the Sauerland. In the partnership, the company says, Gerhard handled development and sales while Hegener took on organisation, finance, purchasing and logistics.

The beginnings were small. Production, storage and packing took place in Hegener’s private home — “garage, hallway, kitchen, and living room,” in the company’s words — and FIDELITY, in a sponsored brand profile of 2019, called the early firm a “Küchentisch-Klitsche,” a kitchen-table outfit. The first model was the Tempo, a two-way stand-mount that the company says used SEAS mid-woofers, a Dynaudio dome tweeter and a thin-walled MDF cabinet. A cheaper Spark followed, and then a larger model, the Virgo, for which the company says it developed a multi-chamber cabinet to split resonances.

Where the company started is less clear than its present address suggests. SoundStage! Ultra wrote in 2017 that Audio Physic was “founded in Brilon.” Gerhard’s own online CV, on the website of his later company Süsskind Audio, lists a move to Dieburg in 1985, to Scharfenberg — a village that is part of Brilon — in 1989, and the “relocation of AudioPhysic to Brilon” in 1991. We give Brilon as the company’s home, not necessarily its birthplace.

The breakthrough, by both accounts, was the Avanti, a slim three-way floorstander with side-mounted bass drivers working in a push-push arrangement, which Gerhard dates to 1989. The company credits a long review in the American magazine The Absolute Sound with making its name abroad and then at home. Its history places an early Virgo before the Avanti, while Gerhard dates the Virgo’s launch to 1991; his CV adds the Medea of 1993, with Manger transducers, the semi-active Cerubin of 1997 at DM 190,000 and the Kronos of 2003 at €85,000. Those are his dates and prices.

From founder-led to manager-led.

Gerhard did not stay. His CV says he left in 2004 “after 20 years at the helm” — a span that does not quite fit a 1985 founding — and founded Sonics in 2005, then Süsskind Audio in 2011. Michael Fremer, writing in AnalogPlanet in 2013, likewise described him as the founder of Audio Physic who went on to design speakers first called Sonics by Joachim Gerhard. The German company register, as indexed by North Data, shows the business long traded as Audio-Physic Joachim Gerhard GmbH and took the name Audio Physic GmbH in a registry entry published in October 2006.

The company was then run by Dieter Kratochwil. When he retired as managing director on 1 August 2017 after “nearly 15 years,” STEREO reported, he remained a shareholder and adviser. His successor was Wolfgang Lücke, then 52, who had studied business and spent 17 years as director of the Frankfurt Musikmesse. FIDELITY, visiting in August 2020, reported that Lücke had worked in Kratochwil’s record shop as a student, and that the sound engineer Claudia Sommer, formerly of Greenpeace, had joined as a shareholder in the autumn of 2019. On 1 July 2022 Lücke handed over to Thomas Saheicha, who had come from Linn at the end of 2020 as sales director, according to STEREO and FIDELITY.

The register shows three active shareholders but does not name them on its free pages, and we have not seen the shareholder list, so we describe the ownership only as far as the press has reported it. We found no report of Audio Physic being sold to a larger group.

The sound has, for a quarter of a century, been the work of Manfred Diestertich, whom FIDELITY called the company’s technical mastermind “since 1999.” A civil engineer by training, he told The Absolute Sound in 2016 that he had met Gerhard in the early 1980s, before Audio Physic began. The company says he had earlier developed the PAT Triangel at a firm called IQ and joined Audio Physic after the developer Bernd Theis left. He is its chief developer — not, on any source we found, its owner.

German hi-fi, from Brilon to Berlin.

Germany has a long record in consumer audio. Braun, founded in 1921 and now part of Procter & Gamble, is known for its design of the 1960s to the 1980s, English Wikipedia says; Grundig, founded by Max Grundig in 1945 and based for most of its life in Fürth, became a leading maker of radios and televisions before filing for insolvency in 2003.

For more than two decades the hi-fi trade met at the HIGH END show in Munich, run by the HIGH END SOCIETY. In September 2024 the society announced that the show would leave Munich’s MOC, audioXpress reported, and in June 2026 it opened for the first time at the Austria Center Vienna, with about 23,100 visitors, according to sempre-audio.at.

German magazines such as STEREO, stereoplay, AUDIO and FIDELITY review the country’s hi-fi equipment.

Some makers sell direct rather than through dealers. Teufel, founded in Berlin in 1979, switched in 1990 from specialist retailers to direct sales by catalogue, English Wikipedia says, and Nubert describes itself on its website as a direct seller, a “Direktvertrieb.”

The makers in this guide are spread across the country: MBL and Teufel in Berlin, T+A in Herford in Westphalia, Canton at Weilrod in the Taunus, Quadral at Isernhagen near Hanover, Nubert in Schwäbisch Gmünd and Audio Physic in Brilon in the Sauerland, according to the legal notices on their websites.

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.

Made in Brilon — with parts from elsewhere.

Audio Physic says its loudspeakers are developed and hand-built in Brilon; its 2022 press release, published by FIDELITY, says they are “bis heute im sauerländischen Brilon entwickelt und von Hand gefertigt” — still developed and handmade in Brilon. STEREO reported in 2017 that all its loudspeakers were made exclusively at the Brilon headquarters, and FIDELITY’s 2020 visit described final assembly there: glass side panels glued on by hand, drivers burned in for several days, and each finished speaker measured against reference values before it receives a serial number. The company works from Almerfeldweg 38 in Brilon.

Assembly is not the whole story. The Absolute Sound reported in 2016 that all Audio Physic’s drivers, tweeters included, were built to its specifications by Wavecor, with Audio Physic owning the tools; Wavecor’s own website gives its factory address in Zhongshan, in Guangdong, China. SoundStage! Ultra reported in 2017 that the Codex’s cabinets were built in a specialised factory near Brilon, with glass from a nearby supplier, veneered panels made in Italy and capacitors from Clarity Cap, while FIDELITY saw AudioQuest internal wiring and terminals made in a small batch by WBT of Essen. The 2019 sponsored FIDELITY profile said Audio Physic favoured domestic suppliers yet named its driver maker as “WaveCore”; we read that as Wavecor and note the tension. “Made in Brilon” is best read as designed, assembled and tested there.

The look is consistent. Many of its floorstanders lean back — the company cites a 7-degree tilt for phase alignment — on narrow, trapezoidal cabinets, and the Structure, shown at HIGH END 2017, introduced what the company calls a “Honeycomb Sandwich Board” of thin wood, plastic honeycomb and glass, with ceramic foam inside, FIDELITY reported. Its slogan, filed as a word-and-figurative mark in 2021 according to North Data, is “NOTHING BUT MUSIC.”

For a design guide, Audio Physic shows how a small maker can turn engineering choices — the tilt, the slim baffle, the glass cheeks — into a recognisable family look. Compare ELAC and Burmester, two other German audio makers. For this guide we use graphite, ceramic white and a muted glass green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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