A luxury line inside Fischer Audio.

Kennerton is the high-end brand of Fischer Audio, a headphone company in St Petersburg, Russia. By its own account, Fischer Audio was founded in 2006 “by a team of audio enthusiasts” and began by selling mid-priced headphones made in Chinese and Taiwanese factories, which its engineers reworked before they went on sale. After the change, the company says, Kennerton looked first to export markets in developed countries, and only later turned more attention to Russia and its neighbours. It names no founders, and we found none in the sources we checked; neither brand has a Wikipedia article.

In 2009, the company says, it decided to leave the mass market and make high-end products “entirely created by our own hands here in Russia”; its timeline dates the decision to found a “luxury sub-brand” inside Fischer Audio to October 2009. A limited “15th Anniversary Edition” of its M-12 Titan headphones, released in October 2024 in a run of 100, fits that date. The relationship is still visible: the brand’s online shop carries the copyright line “Fisher Audio LLC,” and the review site 6moons called Kennerton “Fischer Audio’s upscale division” in 2020.

The name is explained on the company’s website: it joins two German words, Kenner, meaning experts or connoisseurs, and Ton, meaning sound. Its symbol is a bat, chosen, the company says, as “one of the creatures with the most highly developed hearing.” Its slogan is “Headphones as fine art.”

Odin, Thror and the Gjallarhorn.

Kennerton’s first products, according to its timeline, were cables, made with the German cable maker JIB from June 2012, and smaller headphones: the on-ear Magister in September 2012 and the Algiz and Laguz in-ear models, named after runes, that November. Work on its own planar-magnetic driver began in January 2011 and took almost four years; a pre-production Odin was shown at the IFA trade show in Berlin in September 2014 and went on sale in January 2015. The timeline calls that its first IFA, while 6moons wrote that the brand first appeared before European audiences at IFA in 2011, so we note both.

Most of its headphones take their names from Norse myth. 6moons’ Srajan Ebaen pointed to Odin and his son Váli, Thridi as another name for Odin, the horn of the god Heimdall in the Gjallarhorn, and Wodan as the Germanic form of Odin; Thror is a dwarf king in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The Vali arrived in 2015 with a driver the company says it developed with engineers from Peerless of Denmark; the flagship planar Thror in November 2017; and in 2020 the Gjallarhorn GH-50, a horn-loaded headphone that Kennerton calls the first of its kind. Later models include the closed-back Rognir, the Heartland, the M-12 Titan and, in 2024, the Arkona and Vinneta, planar headphones that the company says use a paper-composite membrane.

The fullest independent review we found is 6moons’ review of the Wodan, published in November 2020 at €2,222, which ended with an award. Ebaen dealt with Vladimir Milashin, whom he counted among the hi-fi designers working in Russia, though he gave him no job title. Kennerton dates that award to March 2018; we give the magazine’s date. The company also lists a 2016 Hi-Fi World award for the Magister Pro, which we have not checked. It has made headphones for other brands too, including LSA and, from 2020, the American seller Apos, according to its timeline.

Design and documentation.

Beyond the best-known headphone names, a group of smaller specialists builds around less common designs: planar magnetic drivers, true ribbons and electrostatic panels. The seven makers here span the United States, Europe, Russia and China, and most have a thin public record.

Three make planar magnetic headphones. Abyss, a division of JPS Labs, gives its address as Lancaster, near Buffalo, New York, and says it machines and assembles its headphones there. Kennerton, which sells planar and dynamic models, gave its location as St Petersburg on its website as archived in 2025. Sivga, best known for wooden-cup dynamic headphones and the parent of the planar brand Sendy Audio, is in Dongguan, in China’s Guangdong province.

RAAL’s website described it in 2007 as a company based in Zaječar, in eastern Serbia; its ribbon headphones, first sold as RAAL-requisite, now carry the RAAL 1995 name, and its American distributor, Requisite Audio, says they are handmade in Serbia. Warwick Acoustics, which makes electrostatic headphones and car audio systems, gives its address as the MIRA Technology Park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

The other two work in central Europe. Ultrasone’s legal notice gives an address in Wielenbach, in Bavaria, and it speaks of “craftsmanship from Bavaria.” Erzetich, which makes the dynamic Mania and Thalia and the planar magnetic Phobos as well as amplifiers, gives an address in Nova Gorica, Slovenia, and says its workshop is “located in the Slovenian woods.”

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.

“Handcrafted in St. Petersburg.”

Kennerton’s flagship models are labelled “Handcrafted in St. Petersburg,” and its website describes the workshop in detail: an attic floor in a building of the Nevskaya shoe factory company, near the Moscow Triumphal Gate, where it says about twenty people work. Ear cups are cut on CNC machines, both cups of a pair from a single block of wood dried for at least six months — usually oak, maple or ash, but also rarer timbers including Karelian birch, bubinga and bog oak — then sanded by hand and finished with oil or wax. Ear pads are sewn from leather or velour in a neighbouring room, and each finished pair is run in for 70 hours before it is measured.

The company is also unusually frank about what it does not make. Its dynamic models use drivers made for it in Taiwan; its planar drivers, it says, are now made in Russia — by a supplier it names as NPO Diffuzor, by the maker Snorry for its Veritas model, or in-house for the paper-membrane Arkona and Vinneta — and it has not yet found a Russian supplier for its headbands. We give these as the company’s statements. Its web address has changed too: kennerton.org redirects to kennertonaudio.ru, according to the Internet Archive, with an English site at kennertonaudio.com. We found no published brand guidelines or colour values.

For a design guide, Kennerton shows how wood, myth and an animal symbol can carry a small maker’s identity. Compare Meze, the Romanian maker known for wooden ear cups, and Grado, another headphone maker that works in wood. For this guide we use bog oak, oak and lambskin with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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