Gold Note Audio

An Italian company that builds the whole chain

Most audio manufacturers specialise. Gold Note do not. From their factory at Montespertoli, in the hills southwest of Florence, they build turntables, tonearms, cartridges, phono stages, amplifiers, DACs, streamers, power supplies and loudspeakers, and the great majority of it is made in-house rather than badged.

That is less surprising once you know where the company came from. Maurizio Aterini set up a technical design studio in 1992 and spent the next two decades engineering audio products for other manufacturers, Luxman, Bryston and Oracle among them. Gold Note was founded in 2012, when Aterini and his partners decided to stop building other people's products and put their own name on the result. He designed the early turntables himself.

That has a practical consequence worth understanding. Because Gold Note design both ends of the chain, the matching between a Gold Note turntable, cartridge and phono stage is closer than you would normally get from three separate manufacturers. The loading options on their phono stages are unusually broad because they know exactly what their own cartridges want, and the same applies to the power supply upgrades that run across the electronics.

The design language is unmistakably Italian and the finish quality is a large part of the appeal. So is the pricing. Aterini has described the central problem of the company as how to build to that standard without letting prices run away, and keeping design and manufacturing under one roof is a large part of the answer.

The electronics are grouped into series, so a 5 Series unit and a 10 Series unit are different levels of the same idea. The turntables, cartridges and speakers are named individually rather than by series, which is why the two are filtered separately below.