The History of Heed Audio
The Heed Evolution

Heed Audio Ltd is a specialist hi-fi manufacturer in Hungary, led by chief designer Zsolt Huszti. He and his small team design and manufacture high-end products at reasonable prices.
The first Heed Audio product, a solid-state pre/power amplifier based on a unique circuit topology, was launched on the Hungarian and German markets in 1993.

The Beginnings
Our hi-fi story goes back, however, to 1987 when Zsolt Audio was formed to import famous British products into Hungary: Audiolab, Arcam, Celestion, Creek, Epos, Exposure, Ion Systems, NAD, Rega, Roksan, Royd and Spendor, amongst others. Becoming more and more attracted to the idea of manufacturing products to his own design, in 1991 Zsolt introduced his first creation, the StandART loudspeaker. Nearly 1,000 pairs of this floorstander were sold - an astonishing success on the small and underdeveloped Hungarian market. At that time we met Richard Hay, the legendary designer of Nytech, and later Ion Systems products, and this acquaintance proved to be very important in our activities. We started to assemble on our premises the unique ‘shoebox-design’ Obelisk amps, a kind of Naim for people on a budget, which turned out to be a big hit on the Hungarian market. These two years of cooperation with Ion Systems were useful experience for us in hi-fi manufacturing, as well as an invaluable learning process in developing and realizing ideas well beyond the run-of-the-mill thinking disappointingly all too common today. Consequently, we have kept many of the unique ideas and technical principles of Richard Hay - use of balanced circuits, external power supplies, active crossovers, avoiding of DC coupling, and so on - even though Ion Systems were ultimately unable to overcome their financial troubles and went out of business.

We decided to carry on the spirit of Ion, and formed Heed Audio. Whilst Ion's famous amplifier, the Obelisk, found a second life in our Heed Obelisk Pro, a new amp concept was also elaborated and realized alongside that. Based on one of Richard Hay’s brain-waves, the Heed Nexus power amplifiers were born - a second-to-none circuit topology in which a highly unusual bridge-mode approach has been used to avoid DC coupling and to realize a fully balanced "floating" system. Although this exceptional product range - which has very little in common with solid-state amplifiers apart from the transistors generally used in both - is not in production currently, we strongly hope to revive it with a new finish and some minor changes in the foreseeable future.

Heed Audio 2000
A new era began at Heed Audio in 2000 when our former German distributor - Marvel & Heiss - ordered one of our auxiliary components, the Orbit PSU, which was originally designed for Zsolt’s DIY hi-fi magazine Hang & Technika (Sound & Technology), as a power-supply kit for Rega Planar turntables. The idea of a product which could successfully tie in to the over 300,000 Planar turntables sold world-wide proved to be right on the money: "this analogue performance-enhancing drug is bloody cheap in comparison with rival products, not least those selling in huge quantities", as the German high-end magazine Image Hi-Fi declared in its rave review.

The success of the Orbit led us to develop further products: for example, again with the encouragement of our German distributor, the Heed team designed another vinyl-related product, the Quasar phono stage. Press and retailers alike give high praise to this discretely built, two-box phono device ever since it has appeared in the high-end scene.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to our English copy editors and language consultants, James Patterson & Jeff Gibson for their thorough and devoted assistance.