Avid

Avid's story starts with a teenager. In 1977, a 16-year-old Conrad Mas was captivated by a friend's home-built turntable — an obsession that never really left him. After earlier ventures through the 1980s, Mas founded AVID HiFi in 1995 in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, from famously humble garage beginnings, with one mission: eliminate vibration from the audio replay chain and build a genuinely uncompromised turntable.

That singular focus produced the flagship Acutus turntable in 1999, which spawned an entire range built around Avid's signature approach to mechanical grounding — physically binding record and platter together so vibration is dissipated almost instantly, lowering noise and revealing far more musical detail. The company has since expanded into precision tonearms, phono stages, cartridges, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, all designed and built in-house at its Cambridgeshire factories using high-precision CNC machining and hand assembly.

Still founder-owned and run by Conrad Mas more than 30 years on, Avid designs virtually everything itself, distributes to around 50 countries, and remains guided by the same "groove to ear" philosophy that started with one obsessed teenager and a friend's turntable.