Hi Fi: The History Of High End Audio Design

Most people assume audio equipment became beautiful by accident, as a side effect of engineering. This book argues the opposite.

Gideon Schwartz, a former attorney who left law to found the New York ultra-high-end audio company Audioarts, traces how deliberately the look and feel of top-of-the-line equipment was designed, from the 1950s through to the present day and beyond. The 272 pages cover the full arc: Bose's earliest loudspeaker experiments, Dieter Rams' all-white turntable for Braun, and the current revival of analogue technologies that has brought a new generation of designers back to formats many had written off. Over 300 illustrations carry the argument where words cannot, making the equipment itself the primary evidence.

Schwartz's position as a practitioner rather than a critic gives the book a particular angle. He is not reconstructing a history from the outside. He built a business around the conviction that audio hardware deserves the same serious attention as furniture or architecture, and the book is the written version of that conviction. The closing chapters on where the field is heading now are the natural consequence of someone who still has skin in the game. Published by Phaidon, "Hi Fi: The History of High End Audio Design" is the most comprehensive single account of how sonic ambition and visual design became, for a certain class of object, genuinely inseparable.