Two Goldmund engineers and a group of distributors.

CH Precision was founded in 2009 in the canton of Vaud, on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva, by Florian Cossy and Thierry Heeb. The name comes from the first letters of their surnames, AnalogPlanet and hi-fi+ both reported; that “CH” is also the international code for Switzerland, from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica, both accounts describe as a coincidence.

The two were not newcomers. According to Michael Fremer of AnalogPlanet, writing in June 2019, their work in high-end audio began in the 1990s at Goldmund, the Swiss high-end electronics brand. They left to form Anagram Technologies, an OEM company that built a reputation for digital-to-analogue converters supplied to other makers. Fremer wrote that the partners founded CH Precision in 2009 “with the encouragement of a group of distributors.”

The company’s first product was the D1 CD and SACD player and transport. hi-fi+ wrote in 2021 that the D1 had established the company’s “user configurable, upgradable, card-cage construction,” and that for more than a decade it had been paired with the C1 digital-to-analogue converter. Preamplifiers, power amplifiers, a phono stage, an integrated amplifier, master clocks and an external power supply followed, and together they became the 1 Series.

The commercial register tells a quieter story about ownership. CH Precision is a Swiss limited-liability company, a Sàrl. Entries in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce show Heeb transferring three of his five shares to Cossy in 2019, and in December 2021 record that Heeb “is no longer a partner” and had passed his remaining shares to Cossy, the managing partner. The register records shareholdings, not job titles, so we draw no further conclusion. The company’s website now says simply that “Florian Cossy founded CH Precision”; the trade accounts above name both men, so we give both.

Engineered in-house, assembled by a small team.

The company’s address has moved around the lake. The register lists its legal seat in Chexbres, in the Lavaux, until 2021, then in Villars-sous-Yens, and since August 2026 in Préverenges, a small town west of Lausanne, in the Le Trési industrial zone. The workshop itself was already in Préverenges in 2020, when Alan Sircom of hi-fi+ visited and described “a business park with two nearby facilities.”

How the products are made is documented in some detail, and it is more nuanced than a slogan. Sircom wrote that the staff was small — it “could just about field a soccer team,” with over half working on design — that products are built in batches of up to six, and that circuit boards come from a third-party Swiss manufacturer, while “testing, additional processes and tuning, and final assembly is all performed in house.” Fremer’s 2019 report said the same of the boards and added that the chassis and enclosures are made by local subcontractors who also work for the Swiss watch industry, naming the machine shop Savimec. Claims seen elsewhere that every part, chassis machining included, is made in-house are not supported by those two visits.

The company’s own claim is about engineering rather than manufacturing. It says that “every aspect of a CH Precision component is engineered in-house,” from analogue and digital circuitry to signal processing, software, power supplies and mechanical design. Its named technologies include ExactBias, for controlling amplifier bias, software-adjustable feedback, PEtER spline filters for its converters and the MORSE disc-transport mechanism, according to its website.

The idea that runs through the range is modularity. CH Precision says a single-chassis unit can grow into a dual-mono pair, and that converters and transports can be upgraded with extra processing, external clocks or dedicated power supplies rather than replaced. In 2020 Sircom found that, apart from cables and the A1 amplifier, every product the company had made in its first eleven years was still on its order books.

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.

Two series, two named designers.

Unusually for a hi-fi maker, CH Precision credits its industrial designers by name. Its website says that Manuela Federica Krebser of iSHONi Design, a Swiss designer who founded her studio in 1996, was commissioned in 2009 to design “the enclosure and visual identity of the first CH Precision product line” — the 1 Series. The later 10 Series was designed by Sven Adolph of Momentum Design, an industrial design practice in Zurich. The company says it keeps “distinct design languages for different product families” rather than one uniform look.

The 10 Series was first shown at the High End show in Munich in 2019, ten years after the company’s founding. The Audio Beat reported from the show that, having “spent ten years completing its 1 series,” CH Precision had started again with the L10 line preamplifier and M10 power amplifier, priced at 70,000 and 90,000 Swiss francs. It noted the visible differences: a straight feature line on the fascia instead of the 1 Series’ curve and, beside “the distinctive blue/gray color,” finishes in anthracite and gold. The range now also includes the D10 transport, C10 converters, P10 phono stage and T10 clock, while the 1 Series continues alongside it, according to the website.

That blue-grey finish is the nearest thing to a documented brand colour; no official palette or typeface is published.

For a design guide, CH Precision shows how an engineering-led company can make modularity and restraint its identity, and credit the designers who gave it form. Compare Goldmund, where its founders began, and Soulution, another Swiss maker of high-end amplifiers. For this guide we use a slate blue-grey, anthracite and a muted gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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