WE ARE JUST HIFI LOVERS

Twenty years, and stuck in the middle

Twenty years in hi-fi, the first of them in retail. I have run Haute Fidélité only since early 2025.

That puts me in a specific and slightly uncomfortable place. On one side, the people who have been doing this for forty years and know every reference by heart. On the other, a generation discovering the gear with no idea of where it came from. The first group doesn’t need anything explained to them. The second group has nobody to tell them. HiFi Lovers was born in that gap.

Hi-fi has to leave its own small world. That isn’t aimed at the people who sell it — I come from there, and the best shops have been doing this work for years, with more care than anyone gives them credit for. It’s a question of reach. We speak beautifully to people who already know.

The world started without us

The audience at the shows has turned over: younger, more women, people arriving from design, fashion and nightlife, asking questions about a pair of loudspeakers that nobody was asking ten years ago.

Elsewhere, the rest of the world moved first. Listening bars are opening everywhere, modelled on the Japanese jazz kissa. Fashion houses are installing listening rooms in their spaces. Klipsch showed its project with OJAS in Milan, during design week — not at an audio show. Audio gear has left the specialist shop and entered culture, and it isn’t going back.

None of this is nostalgia. Hi-fi isn’t going backwards. The rest of the world is rediscovering that listening takes an object, a room and time.

People want to own what they listen to again

Vinyl opened the door. The CD came back, the cassette too, Blu-ray is holding on where we had buried it, and serious print is reappearing — everywhere in the world, at the same time.

This isn’t collector’s nostalgia. It is what happens when everything becomes available, instant and interchangeable: you start looking for things that have a shape, a duration and an end. Something you choose, pay for, shelve, lend. Something you don’t scroll past. And something good, because once you decide to own an object you want it to earn the space it takes up.

It is the same movement that puts a turntable back in a living room and makes a magazine possible in 2026. Hi-fi isn’t a special case. It is the audio version of a much wider appetite.

Audiophile, no quotation marks

I’ll use the word. Without quotation marks, and without apologising for it.

Being an audiophile isn’t knowing frequency curves. It is loving music and loving the machines that carry it, new and old, and respecting the companies that built them — their patents, their best years. It is understanding that a seventies amplifier is the same kind of object as a mechanical watch, a good bottle or a rare pair: something designed, made, kept, handed on.

There is nothing to modernise here. There is a way of showing it.

A magazine, then everything else

Haute Fidélité has been published since 1992. It is now the only magazine on French newsstands devoted entirely to hi-fi. The magazine does its job: it tests the biggest machines, with the rigour that demands.

HiFi Lovers borrows other codes — independent print, fashion, sneaker culture — for the same passion. Editions first: one hors-série — a standalone collector edition — for one legendary manufacturer on one major anniversary. 23 × 30 cm, premium paper, made to be kept. Bang & Olufsen got a book for its centenary; others deserve one and will never get it unless somebody does the work.

The rest will follow if it’s right. Apparel, objects, events, a label. And why not a room, one day. Nothing is promised. At the centre of all of it, there is only one thing: music.

You can’t wear a loudspeaker

Because I have collected sneakers all my life, and I had no reason to keep my two obsessions in separate rooms.

You can’t wear a loudspeaker. You can wear a pair. It goes out, it gets seen, it moves through places hi-fi hasn’t reached in a long time. The first one — a McIntosh on a Nike Dunk Low, built with Arthur Berquet in Paris — does the same thing every time I wear it: people look before they understand, then they understand, then they ask. An object opens a conversation no spec sheet will ever open.

One country, one pair

The shoe comes from the same country as the audio gear.

McIntosh is American, so Nike. Yamaha is Japanese, so Onitsuka Tiger. Klipsch is American: the pair will be American, and this time so will the hands that build it.

The rule arrived with the first hors-série. It isn’t decoration, it’s the design principle of the series: one country, one collaboration. In time, one maker per country.

And it is the only thing I impose. Silhouette, materials, technique: everything else belongs to the maker. The commission is paid — never a pair traded for exposure — and I don’t send moodboards.

These pairs are not for sale. One 1 of 1 per edition, never a drop, never a product. They carry the edition on social, and I wear them.

Not hipsters, not merch

Not hi-fi for hipsters, and not a magazine selling merch. We love this equipment, its history and its present, and nothing here is trying to be simpler or cheaper. The bet is elsewhere: making desirable the things that deserve to be.

Time. Sound. Emotion.