Purifi builds the amplifier and transducer technology inside some of the best-sounding products in high-end audio — NAD, T+A, Lyngdorf, and Kii Audio all run on our engineering. Last week, we hosted Danish Sound Cluster for an afternoon at our new headquarters in Roskilde, with guests from across the Danish audio industry.
Building for where we're going
We moved into this headquarters because we'd outgrown the last one. We're expanding the production floor with two full assembly lines plus a dedicated prototyping line, and building out updated electrical and acoustical labs, a dedicated QC lab, and an expanded warehouse.
That's what growth looks like from the inside — always building toward the next thing. We fully expect to outgrow this space too. If we do, it'll mean we're doing something right.
Standing there that afternoon, talking about how we got here, I found myself reflecting on the whole journey — so I wanted to write some of it down.
Where it began
Before this was a place, it was a vision — in the heads of Purifi's founders. That vision, in short, was about getting as close as we could to ideal music reproduction. A straight wire to the soul of music, as our company tagline reads. It's the line we still build around today.
Two technology areas became the initial cornerstones: amplifiers, and transducers.
On amplifiers, that meant a deep, collaborative effort — led by our co-founder Bruno Putzeys — to mathematically describe Class D amplification properly, opening the door to a level of refinement nobody had reached before.
On transducers, it actually started with an idea to compensate for nonlinearities using DSP. But the deeper we researched where those nonlinearities came from, the more we uncovered — a whole set of problems, some new, some just forgotten. That raised an obvious question: why band-aid it in software when you can fix it at the root? The answer became a collaborative effort with PointSource Acoustics, who is now a co-owner of Purifi.
A vision doesn't turn into a company by itself. There's a whole path in between. Embedded in our DNA from day one: research to understanding, understanding to solutions. Solutions, once protected as IP, could finally become something we'd build a product around.
That undersells it, though. A solution to a performance-limiting problem is still a long way from a product customers can buy. There's a long list of robustness and quality-related work — documentation, support, sourcing, manufacturing, IT and finance infrastructure, compliance, safety. The small number of people who have the vision and the depth to develop it rarely have the bandwidth to build the entire company around it alone. We lived that reality ourselves, right from the start.
Our early facilities were, let's say, well suited to a spending-constrained startup. We literally cut down our inherited desks to fit the office, and worked shoulder to shoulder. The building got so cold in winter that we named it "Siberia." That was years ago. Today we're building out a proper headquarters with real room to grow into — the same instinct that got us through those early years hasn't changed, just the scale of what we're building.
It was during that phase that we built our first transducer prototype — with, we believe, the most linear motor ever built for this kind of application. Reality humbled us quickly: performance got completely drowned out by an entirely different set of problems we hadn't even been looking for. It took another year to work through them. That year is where the now Purifi-signature "NeutralSurround" took shape.
We got a good laugh — and some concern — out of people's early reactions to it, too. Anyone who saw the driver assumed something had broken during shipping; the surround simply didn't look the way people expected a loudspeaker surround to look. Once we told the story behind it, and proved out the physics — what it was actually doing, and why a standard half-roll surround could not work — the reaction flipped completely. My favourite comment, from an interested engineer, was: "Wow — now you can spot distortion before even listening to the speaker."
Getting to market
We released our first products in 2018 and 2019, and signed our first licensing deals around the same time. That's the point where the vision actually started turning into something real.
As audio engineers who'd been around the block, we knew the path to success meant winning customers who already had their hands full executing their own roadmaps, often with too few resources to spare. We had to identify them, get them genuinely interested in our story, and demonstrate the technology. They had to assign resources for analysis and testing. They had to fall in love with the technology. They had to rearchitect their own product plans, then develop, test, and release products of their own. A long, effort-consuming phase — it takes patience, and patience takes time. And time, as they say, is money.
As a young company — with a strong vision, real knowledge, a lot of passion, and now solid, scientifically proven technology — the one thing we were missing was revenue. Our good, long-time friend and renowned audio veteran Peter Lyngdorf was, and still is, a firm believer, and he funded us through those first difficult years.
Weathering the storm
Just as we were finding our footing, COVID hit. Business shut down. No lab access. All the samples we'd sold so successfully sat idle on shelves in our customers' labs. It wasn't until people were finally back at work that projects on the customer side started moving again.
There's an irony in it: the broader audio industry thrived during those years, as people stuck at home spent more on audio. But for a young company without mass production yet, that boom didn't do much for us directly.
Then came the global component shortage. Most audio companies spent that entire stretch keeping their existing products alive, scrambling for parts — not much room left for new development.
But following the audio boom, we saw a genuine, newfound market interest in innovation. It was no longer enough to sell "old" products, or simply be able to deliver. No more status quo. We saw a real refocus on genuine enhancements, real innovation, and the bar being raised industry-wide. That's when the samples we'd shipped years earlier finally found their way from engineering labs into real product plans.
Today, demand for our technology has grown faster than we expected. We're currently scaling transducer manufacturing output fourfold, a deliberate and well-underway effort, with exciting plans already taking shape for the phase beyond that. We're also broadening our approach — looking beyond amplifiers and transducers alone — with our research and IP focus running as strong as ever, alongside productisation, manufacturing, and commercial execution.
That's the journey of Purifi in a nutshell: from a handful of engineers to a full team working in concert to make a shared vision real. From zero products and zero revenue to a growing catalogue, an expanding customer base, and new opportunities opening on a regular basis.
Growing into it
Turning that vision into an actual company — governance, compliance, quality systems, the whole professional backbone that lets a partner trust us with their product — is its own story, one I'll come back to another time.
For now, I'll close on where all of this actually lands.
This building, this moment
Which brings me back to where I started this. New headquarters, still under construction in places, already too small for what's coming. That's not a problem to apologise for — it's the clearest sign we're building the right things.
What I want to leave you with is more personal: the joy of working in an industry I genuinely care about, alongside the best colleagues I could ask for. And, in the bigger picture, alongside fellow Danish audio companies, collectively doing what we can to keep Denmark on the map as a country of audio excellence.