One family name, two companies.

Struss is a family name before it is a brand. Its story begins with the amplifier designer Zdzisław Hrynkiewicz-Struss. The company’s website says he designed his first amplifier in 1975, that his designs won recognition and, in time, awards, and that serial production of Struss amplifiers began in 1995; the review site HiFi Philosophy likewise described Struss in 2012 as a Polish company operating since 1995. We found no independent record of the 1975 date, so we give it as the company’s claim.

The amplifiers belonged to the first wave of Polish high-end makers. Writing in 2019, SoundRebels placed Struss Audio among the companies that started in the second half of the 1990s, alongside names such as Ancient Audio, ESA and RLS, and recalled the integrated 140 and the top model S as products that then seemed “the fulfilment of audiophile dreams.” The brand later went quiet for a time — the same review said it had disappeared from the market “for unknown reasons” — before returning with new models.

Then the name divided. According to HiFi Philosophy, writing in 2020, Zdzisław’s son Jacek Hrynkiewicz-Struss, born in 1973, trained in electronics, worked for a time in advertising and joined his father in 2009; the partnership lasted about two years, because the father wanted to aim at high-end buyers while the son wanted an affordable product that would sell widely. Jacek went on to design loudspeakers and cables under the Marcus Audio and REBEL names, both with partners, and from 2019 under his own mark, Struss®. For a time there were two separate businesses: the father’s Struss Audio, making amplifiers, and the son’s Struss®, making speakers and cables. The current Struss website tells the story differently, saying Jacek was involved from the start and that their creative paths “naturally” separated, so we note both accounts.

From the 140 to the DM 250.

Struss Audio’s amplifiers can be traced through the trade press. SoundRebels listed the model Q in 2001, the Chopin in 2002, shown at Warsaw’s Audio Video Show, the larger R500 in 2009, a Chopin Mk IV, and the R150 of 2012, which HiFi Philosophy reviewed that December. In 2018 the company showed prototype class-A power amplifiers, the MPA 400, at the Audio Video Show, and in 2019 SoundRebels reviewed its DM 250 integrated amplifier, priced at €4,370.

That review is the best-documented description of the Struss look. It describes a split black front panel with a coral-red insert, blue indicator LEDs, chrome knobs for input and volume, a lever power switch from the American maker C&K and a weight of 16 kilograms. Inside, it said, the DM 250 used only field-effect transistors in the signal path and a J-FET circuit the company calls HPCS, the “Harmonics and Phase Conversion System,” intended to add even-order harmonics in the manner of a valve circuit, with two 500 VA toroidal transformers in a dual-mono layout.

Jacek’s Struss® took the opposite commercial path. SoundRebels reviewed his flagship S-2 speaker cable in 2020, at 2,500 złoty for a three-metre pair, dismissing the maker’s “Top High-End!” label as premature but praising the cable’s unforced ease and linearity. HiFi Philosophy gave its own Golden Analog awards to the Struss® Classic standmount speakers for 2020 and to the brand’s speaker cable and interconnect for 2021, noting how little they cost.

Design and documentation.

Poland’s audio industry was built by the state. From 1961 most of the country’s electronics works were grouped in UNITRA, a state industrial union run from Warsaw; from 1971 its factories carried “Unitra-” names, Polish Wikipedia records. The loudspeaker works at Września, near Poznań, renamed Tonsil in 1960, held a monopoly on loudspeakers and microphones throughout the communist period.

After 1989 the unions were dissolved and many factories failed. Tonsil became a joint-stock company, was one of the first five companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 1991, and was declared bankrupt in 2004.

The old names have since been revived by new owners. A Września entrepreneur, Sławomir Wieszczeciński, bought the Tonsil brand rights in 2012 and the company says its speakers are again made entirely in the town. The Unitra trademark passed to a new Warsaw company backed by Michał Kiciński, a co-founder of the games firm CD Projekt, which showed prototypes of new Unitra hi-fi in 2022, Benchmark.pl reported; a separate company, Unitra S.A., descended from the state’s foreign-trade arm, now manages property.

A generation of small private makers grew up alongside them, from the 1990s onwards. Several work around Warsaw: Lampizator at Głosków, south of the city; Struss at Parzniew, to the west; and TAGA Harmony at Reguły, on its south-western edge. GigaWatt makes power products in Zgierz, next to Łódź, and Equilibrium, a loudspeaker and cable brand, belongs to Audiothlon of Zielona Góra, according to the magazine Hi-Fi i Muzyka.

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.

Cables, one amplifier, and a family legacy.

By the company’s account, the two halves have since come back under one name. Its website says that Zdzisław Hrynkiewicz-Struss “departed” in 2021, leaving a large body of design work, and that Jacek took over the whole legacy and responsibility for the Struss brand, closing the loudspeaker line to concentrate on amplifiers and cables. We could not find an independent account of what became of Struss Audio as a separate business, and its old web address did not respond when we checked in October 2026.

Today struss.pl lists three cable ranges — Classic, Reference and Ultimate — and one amplifier, the S-200, at 8,300 złoty. The company calls it “the return of a legend in a modern form”: class D output stages integrated with their power supplies, which it says replace heavy and costly older circuits, combined with a JFET input stage meant to add even harmonics, a technique it says appeared in its best earlier products. It also says early customers loved Struss for its value and that later rising prices did not win their approval — the son’s view of his father’s high-end turn, presented as a return to the “original philosophy.” The company is based in Parzniew, near Warsaw, where HiFi Philosophy also placed it in 2021. It does not say where its cables and amplifier are assembled, so neither do we.

For a design guide, Struss shows how a single surname can carry two different ideas of a brand — the costly amplifier and the affordable cable — and how one generation can try to reunite them. Compare Fezz Audio, another Polish amplifier maker, and Pylon Audio, a Polish loudspeaker brand. For this guide we use black, a coral red and chrome grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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