A founder, a partner and a meeting in a lift.

Plinius is often described as Gary Morrison’s company, and some headlines at his death in 2021 called him its founder. The company’s own history tells it differently. Its website in 2005 named Peter Thomson as “the visionary” who began working on his own amplifiers in 1979, and said that Plinius Audio Systems Limited “was formed in 1980.” The New Zealand Companies Register gives a later incorporation date, 28 February 1986, for a company of that name, registered at an address in Palmerston North rather than Christchurch; we give both. The first products, the company said, were the Plinius 2 preamplifier and the Plinius 3, an 80-watt power amplifier, in 1980.

Gary Morrison arrived in 1987. An obituary by Simon Brown in the New Zealand magazine Witchdoctor in April 2021 says Morrison trained as an electronics technician at AWA, then set up his own firm, Craft Audio, whose C3 and C4 amplifier and preamplifier appeared in 1981. He and Thomson met in a lift at the 1987 Wellington Audio Show, the obituary says, and the conversation led them to join forces. Plinius described it as a merger with Craft Audio Limited that formed a new company, Audible Technologies Limited, with Morrison as technical director; the register dates that company’s incorporation to July 1988.

Witchdoctor credits Morrison with the company’s “golden era,” and other obituaries say he was responsible for the Plinius sound from 1987 to 2005. Exports grew in the same period: the company said in 2008 that it had a presence in 35 countries, and by 2015 its website claimed distribution in more than 40. Its early ambition, it later wrote, had been simply “to provide a high fidelity listening experience for local customers in New Zealand.”

Class A, then rounded aluminium.

The amplifiers that made Plinius known were Class A designs. The company’s timeline lists the MA100 mono amplifier in 1986, the SA-50 in 1987, the SA-100 in 1990 and the SA-250 in 1992 — the model that, the company wrote later, made the audiophile world “discover” Plinius. M-series preamplifiers followed from 1990, the 2100i integrated amplifier in 1994, and in 1995 the M12 preamplifier became the first Plinius model in a solid aluminium case. A phono stage called the Jarrah, after the Australian hardwood, followed in 1996.

The look changed after the industrial designer Ross Stevens joined as design director in 2001. The company’s 2005 profile said he had designed washing machines for Fisher & Paykel and worked for B&W, Linn and Philippe Starck. His first Plinius design was the Odeon, a multichannel amplifier launched in 2002, wrapped in aluminium with rounded corners; Witchdoctor calls the 10mm aluminium corners “widely copied,” and the company itself said the Odeon “started a design revolution among its peers.” The same wrap-around case then spread to the integrated amplifiers and the M8 and P10 separates in 2003, and a CD player, the CD-101, followed in 2004.

From 2006 Plinius gave new products Māori names, which it said acknowledged New Zealand’s reputation for innovation: the Koru phono stage in 2006, named for the unfolding fern frond of Māori design, the Tautoro preamplifier in 2007 and the Hiato integrated amplifier, rated at 300 watts per channel, in 2008. Later models carried names such as Kaitaki, Hautonga, Tiki, Toko and Arataki alongside Reference A-150 and A-300 power amplifiers.

Design and documentation.

Hi-fi making in Australia and New Zealand has largely been the work of small firms a long way from their biggest markets. Plinius says it was founded in 1980 to serve “local customers in New Zealand,” and that its amplifiers are assembled at a Christchurch facility shared with other manufacturing work. Krix says it was established in Australia in 1974.

Ownership has often followed the fortunes of a parent. Halcro, its website says, was created by the physicist Bruce Candy inside his metal-detector company, Minelab; when Codan bought Minelab in 2008, Halcro was shelved, until Longwood Audio, set up by the owners of an Australian hi-fi importer, bought its assets — in 2014 or 2023, as different pages of the same site say.

South Korea’s best-known hi-fi names are digital specialists. Astell&Kern began as the premium player brand of iriver, which SK Telecom bought in 2014 and which renamed itself Dreamus in 2019; English Wikipedia says bemyfriends became Dreamus’s largest shareholder in 2025. Aurender makes music servers, and HiFi Rose belongs to Citech, a listed company that made its name with kiosks; Citech says 87% of HiFi Rose’s 2024 sales were exports.

The makers in this guide are Krix and Halcro in Australia, along with Redgum, which stopped manufacturing at the start of 2025; Plinius, in Christchurch, and Perreaux in New Zealand; Aurender, whose head office is at Anyang, just south of Seoul; and HiFi Rose, run from Citech’s offices in Seoul, according to their websites and filings.

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.

Founders out, an engineering firm in.

The founders did not stay. Obituaries say Morrison left when Plinius was taken over in 2006, and the Companies Register supports the date: the present company, Plinius Audio Limited, was incorporated in November 2004, and both Thomson and Morrison ceased to be its directors on 3 March 2006. The register lists Audible Technologies as a former shareholder. Today the company is wholly owned by Contex Engineers Limited, a Christchurch engineering firm incorporated in 1983, which the register names as its ultimate holding company. One of the current directors is Brian Willoughby, whom the 2005 website described as “driving the operation.” The company filed its most recent annual return in September 2026.

Contex says its core skills are machining and fabricating metal, with anodising, assembly and distribution, and it gives the same address as Plinius: 1 Tanner Street, in the Christchurch suburb of Woolston. That fits what Plinius says about manufacturing — that every unit is “individually hand built in our dedicated facility,” anodised finish included, and that “at our facility in Christchurch all aspects of production are situated close to each other on one site,” a facility it says also serves laboratory, medical, camera and GPS products. We give those as company claims. Plinius’s own website was returning errors when we checked in October 2026, and a similar-looking domain, plinius-audio.com, belonged to a German distributor in 2025. Morrison and Stevens went on to found PureAudio in 2009; Morrison died of melanoma in 2021.

For a design guide, Plinius shows how a case shape can become the signature of an amplifier brand. Compare Perreaux, another New Zealand amplifier maker, and Redgum, its Australian counterpart. For this guide we use graphite, silver and a fern green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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