Die 12 BESTEN Schweizer HiFi-Marken aller Zeiten (eine baute für die CIA)

Herisau, 1948. A man registers a factory for electronic devices and initially builds measuring instruments. A few years later, he's working in the same workshop with six employees and launches a tape recorder. The machines that evolved from this were later used to create recordings by the Beatles and Pink Floyd. In 1990, he sold everything. His name only appears at the very end of this episode. Twelve Swiss hi-fi brands, ranked from twelfth to first. And behind this lies an uncomfortable truth: Switzerland is producing more world-class audio equipment today than ever before, but almost every name you recognize no longer belongs to Switzerland. And the companies that are still Swiss are unfamiliar. You'll find the manufacturer in Valais, founded in 2010 by people who previously worked at one of the most prestigious companies on this list. You'll find three men who started in a garage on Lake Zurich in 1986, and whose company still belongs to the same family. You get the amplifier manufacturer who named his brand after an anagram of his own last name and became famous in 2002 at the New York Hilton. You get a factory that builds electric motors for the automotive industry and refrigeration systems for trucks, and on the side, developed one of the best amplifiers in the world because the two bosses are private audiophiles. Their first attempt wasn't good enough, so they started completely from scratch, and five years later, the result achieved 100% in the lab tests of a German trade magazine. You get the Geneva-based luxury brand whose founding is disputed by three sources: two brothers, two young architects, or a group of physics students. We'll tell you this directly, instead of picking one version and selling it to you as the truth. You get the engineer from Neuchâtel who milled the world's smallest portable tape recorders from solid aluminum, went bankrupt due to his own pursuit of perfection, and whose company ultimately fell to the only competitor who was his equal. You'll learn about the Bernese company founded in 1946 by a radio dealer and his wife, a former child laborer, which employed up to 1,400 people at three locations in the 1970s. Their record player could be found in around 100,000 Swiss households. It took just under three decades for the name to disappear. Today, it belongs to a Dutch corporation. And you'll learn about the man whose family fled Warsaw in 1939, arrived in Switzerland in 1943, and whose son, as a student, built a recording device that revolutionized the film industry. Four Oscars, two Emmys, a device used on an Apollo mission, and a commission from John F. Kennedy for a recorder as small as a wallet. Twelve names, one country, and ultimately a question that's not often asked in Switzerland: What is a brand worth when the name remains but the workshop is gone? If you enjoy these kinds of company stories, subscribe to the channel and give it a like. And write in the comments which Swiss brand was missing here, because there's always one.