I’ve stumbled through Europe’s audiophile scene like Blackadder in a French wine cellar — expecting class, but finding pretension. British gear? Reliable, like a butler who silently judges your music taste while still doing the job. Italian speakers? They tug mightily at the heart, but the question remains — is there an intellectual connection, or is it just a pretty face with nothing upstairs? French amplifiers? Sleek, seductive, and as emotionally available as a Parisian waiter who’s already decided you’re beneath them.
And then there’s Eastern European gear, which has been a damn surprise. It’s as if the ghosts of Warsaw, cabbage rolls, and coffee in Prague decided to get into the hi-fi game. Tugging on history while also offering innovation, it’s like someone took a page from the past, dusted it off, and slapped it with a serious “get with the times” attitude.
Who knew the post-Soviet plot twist would be headphones with soul? After Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev, Ceaușescu, and Putin, you’d expect more gulag, less groove—but here we are. Eastern Europe finally tuned in, and Bond himself might pause his martini to nod in approval.
Italians make beautiful things. Maserati. Gaggia. Brioni. Beretta. Sophia Loren. Even their curse words feel like poetry barked through a cigarette. In the world of high-end audio, Sonus faber sits on top of the mountain — glowing like a statue atop Il Duomo, part holy relic, part showroom bait. They build the most beautiful loudspeakers on the planet.
They also make some of the most outrageously priced speakers on the planet, which means the rest of us are stuck outside like broke schmucks peering through the window of a pasticceria—nose to glass, dreaming about the Electa Amator III like it’s a Ferrari we ain’t ever gettin’ the keys to. Forget about it.
But as my old friend Leo Taormina used to say while trimming sideburns and talking calcio, “I tempi stanno cambiando.”
I’ve always believed that audio gear reflects the people who design it. Italians care deeply about beauty. About form. About craftsmanship. Whether they’re cooking, driving, making love, or listening to Mina on a Sunday morning, it has to mean something. It’s not just gear — it’s osso buco for the soul. Slow-cooked, messy, rich with history and marrow-deep emotion. The kind of thing that sticks with you long after the last note fades.
Growing up in Toronto, I straddled a line between cultures. My Hebrew School lunches swapped apple juice for Brio Chinotto. I played soccer in the Italian league and learned to curse in both Italian and Portuguese before I could spell “chutzpah.” My great-great aunt ran a fish shop called Grupstein’s Pesceria on College Street West, which somehow worked.
My parents ran the largest pizza chain in Canada, but I spent more time in Leo and Vince Taormina’s barbershop — shotgunning espresso and inhaling hot veals with extra sauce — than I did at home pretending to care about Pierre Trudeau or Wayne.
Italian hi-fi? It’s everything you’d expect. Bold, stylish, and unapologetically romantic. Sonus faber, Audio Analogue, Gold Note, Unison Research — they’re not just making audio components. They’re making instruments. And they look and feel like something a sculptor would sign their name to.
But here’s the rub: I also have a thing for the French.
Yes, them.
French Hi-Fi: Where Beauty and Emotional Depth Collide and Drown in the Seine
The people who gave us Sartre, Serge Gainsbourg, Truffaut, the Citroën DS, and more existential dread than a Kafka novel — all while chain-smoking next to a woman who looks like Catherine Deneuve and eating a croissant so perfect it makes you question why you ever finished that gordita.
If Italian audio is a hot veal sandwich — rich, messy, and unforgettable — French hi-fi is a pain au chocolat served with a raised eyebrow and a Gauloises. It’s elegant, cerebral, a little aloof, and probably judging you while you listen to Daft Punk through a pair of speakers that look like modern art installations.
Brands like Focal, Cabasse, Triangle, and Métronome don’t just make equipment — they make statements. Focal’s stuff is engineered like it was meant for both your living room and a listening room in Versailles. You don’t just listen to French gear — you’re invited to engage in a philosophical discussion about tonal balance, while sipping Bordeaux and pretending not to care about money.
My first run-in with French audio came in 1993 in a dimly lit hi-fi shop tucked somewhere between the smell of espresso and the stink of cigarettes in the 7th arrondissement.
The place looked like a Bond villain’s listening room — racks of YBA electronics that glowed like alien tech, Jadis tube amps that could double as gold-plated torture devices, and loudspeakers so oddly shaped I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to reproduce Mahler or serve as an abstract homage to the female anatomy.
The whole place shimmered with enough brushed gold and chrome to make the ghost of Marie Antoinette blush. The sound? Immaculate. Precise. Flowing like a silk scarf caught in a Paris breeze. But also… kind of light in the loafers. Beautiful, sure — like watching Eva Green finish that galette in slow motion — but it didn’t hit the gut.
And as someone wired with inherited trauma, simmering guilt, and a neurotic streak wider than the Seine, I need gear that bleeds when I turn the volume up. French hi-fi, at least back then, felt like it was trying to seduce me with champagne and soft jazz when what I really needed was espresso, rain, and a fistful of Ella Fitzgerald.
And that’s where the conflict kicks in.
The Italians tug at the heart. The French whisper to the mind. One side wants to throw on Lucio Battisti and dance barefoot in the kitchen. The other wants to analyze the midrange response of a Debussy piano sonata until you can feel the melancholy in the tweeter’s decay.
I love both. And I hate that I love both. Because French gear often makes me feel like I should’ve gone to finishing school, and Italian gear makes me feel like I should be pouring sauce on everything and yelling about Juventus. Both aesthetics are intoxicating in their own way — one with a smirk, the other with a slap on the ass and a glass of grappa.
So here I am — a Canadian mutt raised on chinotto and chopped liver, stuck in an endless loop of sonic indecision. Do I chase the beauty and passion of Italian hi-fi, or the precision and finesse of the French?
Maybe the answer’s somewhere in between.
But let’s be honest — the French wouldn’t be caught dead putting marinara on anything, and the Italians would sooner smash a speaker than admit the French made a better amp.
And yet, I can’t quit either of them.
So here I am — torn between Italy’s operatic flair and France’s snobby elegance. One is all passion and panzerotti, the other precision and soufflé . And when push came to shove — when it was time to put actual money down and build a system I could live with — I did what any confused post-Zionist, chinotto-chugging kid from North York would do.
British Hi-Fi: Impeccable Sound, Slightly Less Impeccable Attitude
I went British.
Yes. British.
The same nation that gave us imperialism, warm beer, and the cheeriest nihilism this side of Nick Drake. The irony isn’t lost on me — especially considering certain members of my family had a hand in, let’s say, the premature vacancy of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in the days before Israeli statehood. Suffice it to say, MI6 probably isn’t sending us holiday cards.
And yet, decades later, when my parents thought it was a good idea to move the family to England in the early ‘80s, it went over about as well as a Yid in a Yorkshire pub. We lasted about ten minutes. England didn’t just fail us — it spat us out like bad marmalade on a dry crumpet.
Still, somehow I ended up with Cambridge Audio, Rega, Wharfedale, Q Acoustics, Spendor, Croft, and Michell — the full cast of British audio characters, minus the tweed jackets and colonial guilt. I’ve got turntables that smell faintly of Earl Grey and melancholy, and amps that look like they were built in a decommissioned RAF hangar by men named Clive who mutter about “the war” while polishing resistors. Even the speaker cables have that unmistakable air of something hand-wound by a retired SAS operative named Nigel — probably while listening to Elgar and quietly resenting his children.
And because I couldn’t bloody pick a side in this pan-European fever dream of sonic self-harm, I also ended up with restored Swiss turntables — because nothing says “deep emotional indecision” like buying audio gear from a country whose greatest contribution to conflict is refusing to take part. It’s like shouting, “I surrender to all of you!” and then filing a warranty card in triplicate.
Which, honestly, tracks.
I may love Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, and The Holy Grail more than I should, but England has never loved me back. I’m the commoner Jew from the shores of Lake Ontario — too foreign for Pimlico, too mouthy for Muswell Hill. Now I’ve got two homes — one on each end of the American Eastern Seaboard — like a wandering Cohen with a UPS account and unresolved allegiances, chasing good sound and bad decisions from saltwater to suburbia.
So yes, I admire the Italians. I envy the French. But somehow, I ended up in Her Majesty’s camp — surrounded by dry wit, soggy chips, and I’ve somehow ended up with loudspeakers named Denton and Linton — which sound less like audio gear and more like the posh kids who wouldn’t let me within fifty feet of Eton, unless I was there to clean the chimneys or fix the bloody tonearm.
And just when you think I’ve hit rock bottom in this audio identity crisis, don’t worry — there’s still Germany.
Let’s be clear: I will never own German hi-fi. I don’t care how precise it is. I don’t care if the soundstage is wider than the autobahn and the dynamic range makes Beethoven rise from the grave for one last encore. I don’t want it. I don’t need it. And frankly, I don’t trust anything that emotionless claiming to be about music.
Because, well… history. When your family tree was ravaged by unimaginable horrors, it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about equipment built by people whose past ideas were rooted in dark, destructive ideologies. That cold, sterile perfection—there’s something about it that feels distant, like a space you don’t want to step into. I can’t ignore that. And honestly, I don’t want to ignore it.
So yeah, I’ll pass on the brushed aluminum and Teutonic control. Give me British dysfunction, French delusion, or Italian melodrama any day. At least that kind of emotional chaos feels like home.
And now, as if to cap off this absurd, winding journey, I find myself being drawn back to Eastern European hi-fi. The irony isn’t lost on me — considering my Jewish Polish roots, it’s almost as though the universe is playing some cruel, cosmic joke. After everything — the trauma, the existential spiral through France, Italy, and England — I’m now gravitating toward the hi-fi gear that was born in the shadow of the Iron Curtain.
There’s something oddly beautiful about it. The craftsmanship feels earned, not handed down on a silver platter. It’s raw. It’s honest. And it’s connected to a history that, while steeped in suffering, somehow finds a way to create something worth listening to.
The sound is never polished, but it resonates with a depth that speaks to something ancient, something buried, something that’s been allowed to grow and endure. Maybe it’s just the perfect marriage of pain, roots, and rebellion. The beauty of hi-fi from beyond the Iron Curtain: a sound that doesn’t need to be perfect — it just needs to feel real.
But here’s the thing.
For all the trauma, snark, and continental neuroses, there’s still something beautiful — something almost holy — about sitting in front of a pair of speakers, dropping the needle, and feeling the room dissolve. It doesn’t matter whether the gear was made by a mustachioed artisan in Tuscany, a chain-smoking Parisian with too many scarves, or a British engineer who still calls dinner “tea” and thinks seasoning is for the weak.
Because when it’s right — when the music hits that spot behind the ribs and shakes loose whatever’s been rusting there — it doesn’t sound like a country. It sounds like memory. Like grief. Like joy. Like all the people who aren’t here anymore but should be. Like the people you became because of them.
Maybe I don’t need to pick a side. Maybe the point isn’t about allegiance — maybe it’s about finding little moments of truth in all that noise. About building something out of the chaos, even if it hums a little off-key.
So yeah, I’ve got British boxes, French fantasies, Italian heartbreak, and a Swiss turntable that just spins and doesn’t judge. It’s not perfect. It’s not even logical. But it’s mine. Pity the Russians never took a real stab at high-end hi-fi — they understand the collision of beauty, pain, and raw emotion better than anyone… plus no one knocks the existential slats out of a bed at 4 a.m. quite like a nation raised on Tchaikovsky, vodka, and intergenerational trauma.