Max Magri’s story.

Grandinote is, by its own account, largely the work of one designer. Massimiliano “Max” Magri, its chief executive, is described on its website as the “creator of Magnetosolid® Technology and designer of the Mach loudspeakers.” His own short biography there says he was born in 1973, built his first amplifier — a valve amplifier — in 1996 and graduated in electronic engineering in 1997.

His signature is the transformer. “I never bought output transformers. I designed and built them myself,” he writes. He says he began developing his Magnetosolid technology in 2000 and that the first Magnetosolid amplifier was “born” in 2002. He built that first amplifier a year before he graduated. His biography is written in the first person, which sets the site apart from most in this guide. The company does not give a founding year; its website says only that it has worked for more than 20 years.

Grandinote is based on Via San Lorenzo in Rea, a small town in the province of Pavia, in Lombardy, south of Milan; its website is grandinote.it. A 2019 review in the online magazine 6moons described Magri as being from nearby Bressana Bottarone.

Magneto plus solid.

The name of the technology explains it. Magnetosolid, the company says, joins “MAGNETO (for the ferromagnetic output transformers) and SOLID (for solid-state components)” — transistor amplifiers that use output transformers of the kind more usually found in valve designs. An output transformer couples an amplifier to a loudspeaker; valve amplifiers need one, while most transistor amplifiers do without. The website describes circuits with no feedback, no capacitors between stages, two output transistors in push-pull, each handling half of the waveform, and a separate power supply for every stage, and a “VHP” version with exotic core materials and primary inductance “over 10× higher.”

Magnetosolid is a registered trademark. We found no patent for it, and the company does not claim one, so we describe it as a trademark and a design approach rather than a patented invention.

6moons, the online hi-fi magazine run by Srajan Ebaen, reviewing the Shinai integrated amplifier in June 2019, gave its price as €11,400 and described a black chassis measuring 318 by 196 by 473 millimetres and weighing 40 kilograms, with ventilated top and bottom covers, with curved side panels, zero feedback and direct coupling; the VHP version was sold as the Essenza at €19,800. The review noted that by 2019 Grandinote was showing its own Mach 9 loudspeakers, in carbon-fibre enclosures.

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.

Grandinote is one of the smallest: a company that presents itself through one engineer’s first-person story.

A white wordmark on black.

The company does not explain its name, which reads in Italian as “great notes.” Its current range includes six integrated amplifiers — the Shinai, Essenza, Supremo, Divina, Prestigio and Solo; the Proemio, Domino and Genesi preamplifiers; the Silva, Araldo, Futura and Demone power amplifiers; the Volta, which combines a digital-to-analogue converter with a network streamer; the Celio phono stage, a preamplifier for turntables; and Mach loudspeakers in several sizes, from the Mach 2 to the Mach 16. Several names are Italian words — Supremo, Divina, Prestigio and Futura: supreme, divine, prestige and future. We found no reviews from print magazines in the sources we could reach. It says its products are enjoyed in 26 countries, but does not say which. Like Unison Research, which says it makes its mains and output transformers in-house, Grandinote builds its identity around transformers it designs itself.

On manufacturing it says only that “our manufacturing process combines traditional techniques with modern technology”; it makes no specific claim about handwork or about where every part is made, and we make none. We found no staff or revenue figures.

Its website shows a white horizontal wordmark on a dark ground; we found no published brand guidelines. For a design guide, Grandinote shows a brand built around one person’s engineering voice. Compare Pathos Acoustics, which also combines solid-state and valve thinking, and Audia Flight, also led by one of its founders. For this guide we use black and steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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