An engineer who planned his company from high school.

Fidelix is the company of one engineer, Shin Nakagawa (中川 伸), and almost everything published about its history comes from him. In a memoir posted on the company website in February 2016, written as the magazine MJ Musen to Jikken prepared a feature on his career, Nakagawa says he was born in 1948, built a crystal radio at primary school and, as a high-school member of an audio association in Mie prefecture, built amplifiers for adult music lovers. A catalogue from the amplifier maker Macton, with circuit diagrams printed inside, convinced him that he could one day run an audio company of his own.

His route there was unusual. He writes that he took an idea for a distortion-cancelling circuit to Sony while studying electronics at what is now Chubu University, was invited to join without an entrance examination, and left university to start there in 1969; his first job was the phono-equaliser stage of the flagship TA-1120F amplifier. After nine months he moved to a small computer maker, then — deliberately, to learn how to sell — to door-to-door encyclopaedia sales, and then to the technology importer Rikei. In 1973 he joined Stax, the electrostatic-headphone maker, where he says he designed the DA-300 amplifier and the SRA-10S and SRA-12S.

In 1976, aged 27, Nakagawa started Fidelix as a sole proprietorship; it became a limited company, Yugen Kaisha Fidelix, in 1979, he writes. The company profile gives 1976 as its founding year and its address as Matsuyama, in Kiyose, a city on Tokyo’s north-western edge. It describes the business as designing, making, selling and repairing audio and electronic equipment, licensing patents, giving seminars and writing for technical magazines.

Head amplifiers, tonearms and arguments.

The first product set the pattern. Fidelix’s debut, Nakagawa says, was the LN-1, a head amplifier for moving-coil phono cartridges with an input-referred noise of −157 dBV, prompted by the arrival of Mark Levinson’s JC-1; it was followed by a smaller sibling, the LN-2. Nearly fifty years later the company still makes MC head amplifiers, among them the LIRICO, which its product page presents as the culmination of that line.

The catalogue is analogue-heavy and argumentative. The 0 SideForce tonearm is a straight arm of SUS304 stainless steel on jewel bearings, priced at ¥178,000 before tax; Nakagawa writes that he built offset versions too and dropped them after listening, and the site carries a long series of essays, updated as recently as September 2026, setting out his case on side force and tracking error. The MITCHAKU headshell uses a seesaw arrangement of contact pins that the company calls a world first; PURE FLAT is a thin outer ring for holding records flat; the MC-F1000 is a moving-coil cartridge the company describes as “direct couple.” Digital and amplification appear too: the CAPRICE DAC and preamplifier; the CERENATE power amplifier with volume control, released in March 2009; and the AH-120K Acoustic Harmonator, a super-tweeter system launched in January 2006 as a 30th-anniversary product, which the company says supplies very high frequencies that reproduced sound lacks. A companion gadget, the Polaris-α spectrum checker, went on sale on 22 March 2008 at ¥24,000 for checking whether a system actually reproduces that ultrasonic content.

Fidelix lists a run of Japanese magazine awards: Audio Meikiki-sho prizes from Ongen Publishing for CAPRICE (2011), the LEGGIERO phono equaliser (2016), LIRICO (2020) and MC-F1000; MJ Technology of the Year placings for MITCHAKU (2015), 0 SideForce (2016) and MC-F1000 (2022); and analog Grand Prix awards for LEGGIERO, 0 SideForce and LIRICO.

Specialists and their workshops.

Japan’s audio industry is best known for its large electronics groups, but much of its valve-amplifier and cable trade belongs to small specialist companies. The seven in this guide are all based in or around Tokyo, according to the addresses on their own websites.

Three are valve-amplifier makers. Shindo Laboratory lists its address in Hongo, in Tokyo’s Bunkyo ward. Audio Note, the Japanese company behind the Kondo name, says it was founded in 1976 and has worked with silver since then; it is based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa. Triode, set up in 1994 as Triode Supply Japan, is based in Koshigaya, Saitama; it says it designs its products itself and has them built by partner factories in China, and that its TRV-CD6SE CD player of 2020 was its first product made in Japan.

Two more make a wider mix of equipment. Fidelix, in Kiyose, western Tokyo, gives its founding year as 1976. Kripton, whose range runs from loudspeakers to cables and power accessories, lists its address in Yotsuya, Shinjuku.

The last two are cable and connector specialists. Furutech says it was established in April 1988 and designs and manufactures cables, connectors and power products from Togoshi, Shinagawa. Oyaide Electric began as an Akihabara wire seller in 1952, still runs a shop beneath the JR Sobu line, and has its head office in Yushima, Bunkyo.

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.

The engineer is the identity.

Fidelix has little in the way of a documented visual identity. Its website is plain, text-heavy and written largely in Nakagawa’s own voice, with dated update notes that run from product launches to measurements of stylus friction. We found no published colour, typeface or logo guidance, and the origin of the name is not explained in the sources we checked. The company profile names Kiyose as its base and manufacturing as part of its business, but the pages we read do not say where individual products are built.

Independent coverage is mostly in Japanese print. The company cites a January 2011 technical article on CAPRICE by Isao Shibasaki in MJ Musen to Jikken, and lists coverage of the MC-F1000 in Stereo, Analog, Kankyu Okoku and Stereo Sound, where it says the cartridge placed second in its category in the magazine’s Best Buy rankings. We could not consult those issues, so placings and awards here are as the company reports them; its own pages give the MC-F1000’s Audio Meikiki-sho as both 2022 and 2023, so we leave the year out. Nakagawa’s years at Sony and Stax are likewise documented only in his memoir, but they explain the lineage the company rests on: a phono-stage designer from Sony, then a Stax amplifier engineer, then a workshop of his own.

For a design guide, Fidelix shows a brand built almost entirely on authorship: the engineer’s name, his arguments and his measurements are the identity. Compare Stax, where Nakagawa worked in the 1970s, and Phasemation, another Japanese maker of cartridges and phono stages. For this guide we use signal blue, panel silver and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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