A founder whose own name belonged to someone else.

Daniel Hertz exists because of a name its founder could not use. Mark Levinson, the American jazz bassist turned audio designer, founded Mark Levinson Audio Systems in Connecticut in 1972. He left in 1984, and after a bankruptcy auction and a series of court cases, the Mark Levinson brand passed to other owners and is now part of Harman, owned by Samsung. Levinson could tell people what he designed, but he could not sell audio equipment under his own name. So the person and the brand have separate histories, and his later companies carry other names: Cello, which English Wikipedia says he ran from 1984 to 1998, Red Rose Music, founded in 1999, and Daniel Hertz.

Daniel Hertz was founded in 2007, according to the company and English Wikipedia, which says Levinson moved to Switzerland that year and financed the business with his consulting income. The name is a family one. Daniel was his father’s first name — English Wikipedia, citing Stereophile, says his father, Daniel Levinson, was a psychology professor at Yale — and Hertz was his mother’s maiden name. The company says the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, after whom the unit of frequency is named, was a relative; English Wikipedia, citing a 2011 interview in Mono & Stereo, calls Levinson’s mother a grandniece of the physicist.

The legal entity is Daniel Hertz SA, also registered as Daniel Hertz AG and Daniel Hertz Ltd, and is listed as active by the federal company index Zefix. For years its registered seat was in Geneva; in September 2024 the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce recorded a move to Milvignes, in the canton of Neuchâtel, with an address in care of a local fiduciary firm. Its share capital is CHF 100,000. We did not find its original registration date in the sources we checked.

One amplifier, several speakers and a chip.

In its early years, the Polish magazine High Fidelity wrote in July 2024, Daniel Hertz offered large, expensive separate amplifiers and high-performance loudspeakers. English Wikipedia adds, without a citation, that it has provided consulting services to LG Electronics and the American chip company Intersil.

The current range dates from a relaunch. In a press release dated Venice, 21 February 2023, the company announced that its products were “available for the first time” through its own website, built around a new audio chip it calls Mighty Cat, with embedded processing it calls C Wave. The release named Huey Long as chief executive and described Daniel Hertz as an audio manufacturer, retailer and technology-licensing company “based in Switzerland and Italy.”

The company says it makes only one amplifier, Maria, named after Levinson’s mother, Maria Hertz Levinson. It comes as the two-channel Maria 350, listed at €16,000 before tax, and the four-channel Maria 800, at €40,000, which drives bi-amplified speakers through programmable active crossovers. Both combine a digital-to-analogue converter, preamplifier, power amplifier and headphone amplifier in one acrylic chassis, which the company calls mirror-black Waveglas. The speakers range from the compact Eva and the Amber Midnight to the new Anton, the Chiara, the M4 and the M1, whose system with a Maria 800 is listed at €260,000; a new M1 Delta is listed at €400,000. The company also sells Master Class, a €600 program for Intel Macs whose equaliser, it says, is a digital version of the Cello Audio Palette, one of Levinson’s 1980s designs.

The amplifier has had independent reviews. In The Ear in 2024, Jason Kennedy described the Maria 350 as a Class D design in an acrylic case with Bluetooth and AirPlay but no remote control, credited Levinson and Skip Taylor with devising C Wave, and called it “a very nice amplifier.” High Fidelity, reviewing it in July 2024, listed it as made in Italy at €13,200. At the Montreal Audiofest in March 2024, Daniel Hertz’s room was among the winners of Enjoy the Music’s Best of Show Blue Note awards.

Design and documentation.

Europe has a layer of very small makers whose products are built in small numbers and sold at very high prices. Five of the seven brands in this round are Swiss; the other two are Greek.

The Swiss five are spread across the country. The Swiss commercial register, Zefix, lists Stenheim Suisse SA with its seat in Vétroz, in the canton of Valais; FM Acoustics Ltd in Egg, near Zurich; and Daniel Hertz SA, the company associated with the audio engineer Mark Levinson, in Milvignes, in the canton of Neuchâtel. Boenicke Audio is registered in Basel as a sole proprietorship, and its website is signed by Sven Boenicke.

Lumen White, a loudspeaker maker that dates its speakers to 1999, now gives a contact address in Lucerne; in 2017 its website named a London address for its group and Lucerne for research and development.

The two Greek makers are both in Attica. Ypsilon Electronics says it was formed in 1995 by two sound engineers and gives an address in Paiania, east of Athens; Ideon Audio, founded in 2016, gives an address in Nea Filadelfia.

What links them is scale and price rather than place. At the top of these ranges prices run high — Part-Time Audiophile listed Ideon’s Absolute ε DAC at $47,000 in 2024 — and some runs are tiny: Ideon says its 2026 Ayazi anniversary edition is limited to 20.

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.

A patent, a health claim and two countries.

The company’s central claim is about digital audio itself. Daniel Hertz says the stepped waveform of PCM digital audio causes a stress reaction in the brain, and that C Wave, which it describes as a finely tuned reverberation algorithm, fills in the gaps between samples so that listeners respond as they do to analogue sound. The claim is backed by patents. According to Google Patents, US Patent 11,925,433, filed in July 2020 with Levinson as inventor, assigned to Daniel Hertz SA and granted in March 2024, covers processing PCM audio with reverberation and equalisation settings chosen by measuring listeners with bio-sensors; a continuation, US 12,318,166, was granted in June 2025. Both are titled as methods “to provide health benefits to listeners.” A patent records an invention; it is not evidence that a health effect is real, and we have not assessed the company’s test reports.

Where the products are made has two answers. The company’s website says Daniel Hertz SA is headquartered in Switzerland, with a division, Daniel Hertz S.r.l., in Venice, and that its products are “hand built in small quantities in Venice, Italy,” with parts mainly from small family-owned Italian suppliers; High Fidelity also reported that amplifier production takes place in Venice. The Swiss commercial register, however, describes the company’s purpose as developing, manufacturing and selling high-end audio equipment that is “swiss made,” such as amplifiers and loudspeakers. We report both.

Some of the company’s own history needs care. Its legacy page gives both 1972 and 1974 for the founding of Mark Levinson Audio Systems; we follow 1972, the year Harman gives. Its testimonials, including letters from musicians, are the company’s selection.

For a design guide, Daniel Hertz shows how a founder can build a brand from family names once his own name belongs to someone else. Compare Mark Levinson, the brand that carries his name without him, and darTZeel, another Swiss maker. For this guide we use mirror black, polished steel and a Venetian red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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