That philosophy runs through the whole catalog, from the entry T Series, hand-finished in the same gloss lacquer as the flagships, to the sculpted, nearly teardrop-shaped Reference line, with recent colorways that look more like vintage sports cars than hi-fi equipment. Trace the models over the years and you can watch a company slowly prove that a subwoofer can be a beautiful object in a home.

What we appreciate most, though, is how REL has made true knowledge and passion for sound their mission. It’s evident everywhere, from the numerous tutorials on their site to their personalized approach to setting up customers’ systems, with team members who will spend hours across multiple phone calls walking a single customer through their receiver settings. It goes back to MASTERS, the speaker setup protocol John began developing at 23 that grew into the industry standard, eventually teaching some 2,500 dealers how to properly set up a system. That’s the thing about REL: they’re specialized and also democratic, bringing great sound to the new customer and the genuine audiophile. A true high and low. Their range starts at $599 and runs to $60,000, and every model gets the same obsessive attention. John told us he actually loves designing the entry-level pieces most. With an unlimited budget, pulling off something amazing is expected. Doing it at $599 is the real challenge.

John’s own path to REL is just as good a story. He started in high-end car audio in the late 70s, soldering custom systems into Porsche 911s, then moved through Berkeley’s hi-fi retail world before coming to own Sumiko, one of the most influential high-end audio distributors in the world. There he worked alongside legends like Sonus Faber founder Franco Serblin, whose philosophy, that a product must first be a thing of surpassing beauty before its sound even comes into play, John carries into every REL design today. Sumiko was REL’s largest distributor at the time, and when Lord considered selling the company off, John and his partner Donald Brody couldn’t bear to watch it land in the wrong hands. It took three years to convince Lord to sell it to them instead, through a deal structure we’ll let John tell himself. He does it better than we ever could.

Our conversation ran the full range: pricing in an industry he sees losing its way, the rise of listening bars (he has thoughts), private equity’s grip on audio, and the problems he’s still itching to solve. Read the full interview below.

Coming out of the 35th anniversary and the Planar launch, what are you most focused on right now at REL? Is there a particular problem you’re trying to solve at the moment?

Without getting into specific projects I’m currently working on, I am exploring the dynamic limits of driver technology. We have a small, highly talented team and we’re studying how to produce drivers that can withstand extremely high output levels, while retaining all the strides we’ve taken to reduce moving mass in our cone structures and suspensions. Naturally, this requires very large high current amplifiers. We’re deep into reliability testing on a new 1500 watt amplifier that is a Class A/B-D amp; meaning it has a huge traditional Class A/B power supply (produces incredible current) and a Pure Class D output stage, which keeps it incredibly energy efficient when it’s loafing along or awaiting heavy duty passages. That thing sounds incredible.

Subwoofers have a funny reputation. People either think of them as optional, or they picture car subs. How do you talk about what REL does differently, without getting defensive about the category?

You’re completely right; there’s this whole kinda Cro Magnon part of the hobby where it’s all about massive output and infra bass (below 20 Hz). Then there’s this other group that believe bass, especially bass that can play loud, is somehow inelegant and to be feared. Maybe it’s really about those two groups of people disagreeing and not about subwoofers. I go all the way back into the early 80’s with subwoofers, many of them too crude to do justice to music. When I heard my first REL’s way back in 1994, there was something unique, that connected us with music better, more completely. It wasn’t about the technical aspects (you know, all the crap that comes from lazy marketers), “Our sub is flat to 1/3 of a Hz and plays 130 dB, blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, really? But how does it make you feel? What do you take away from the experience?

When we first heard early RELs, I found myself having very different conversations. I found we were talking about the music, and how RELs, even the early ones, had this unique ability to bring together people who loved, and often played, music. Suddenly we were discussing how certain passages took on a different feel, a denser meaning, or that the midrange suddenly had more life and tonal color. It all starts with our High Level Connection method, where you connect a REL to the power amplifier’s 5-way binding posts, and how that seemingly simple technique allows your entire music system to be tied together into an organic whole. And once that happens, you stop worrying about the pseudo-technical mumbo jumbo and start enjoying music and movies far more. With most subwoofers you HEAR the subwoofer, it announces its presence. With a REL, you cannot hear it until you switch it off, and then you suddenly realize your entire system just fell apart. There’s a kind of magic that no one can fully explain, but you never want to be without it again.

REL makes everything from entry-level pieces to true high-end audiophile products. How do you think about those two audiences when you’re designing, and who do you picture as the REL customer?

First of all, we have a huge range of offerings. We start at $599 and go all the way up to $60,000, and every one of them has a purpose. We don’t just shotgun 28 models out there. We’re a subset of a loudspeaker system, so we have to know that market at least as well as the loudspeaker manufacturers do, and we design in groups of three, reducing down to a couple of models as you get up into the really high end. If you have a $2,000 pair of speakers, it’s not very useful to have a subwoofer line that starts at $2,500. That’s just idiotic.

Honestly, I love doing what for us is relatively entry level, because it’s such a challenge. When I’ve got a virtually unlimited budget, shame on me if I can’t pull off something amazing. My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle, and it was a marvel of mass production. There was nothing on that car that didn’t absolutely need to be there, and yet it was German, a precision piece of kit. Our smaller models, like the T5x, only get five coats of hand-rubbed gloss lacquer instead of twelve, but they’re perfect coats, and you get almost exactly the same effect as our bigger pieces.

What matters most to me is the trust bond with the customer. A lot of our customers are on their third or fourth REL now, 20 years on, because they had such a great experience with their first affordable one. That bond is really sacred to us.

You developed the MASTERS setup protocol decades ago, and now REL puts out all these tutorials and guides. Why is teaching people how to actually listen such a core part of what REL does, and what do you take from doing it?

It goes back to what I think is the biggest disconnect for the buying public, which is how poorly the dealers are trained. All the way back to when we owned Sumiko, we created a training program called MASTERS, a whole speaker setup protocol I started developing when I was about 23. It took 20 years to get fully developed, and we’ve since taught around 2,500 people in the industry how to actually set up speakers and run a demo. It’s shocking how few people understand how a demo even works, the rhythm of a great one, how to do it so the audience isn’t confused.

It’s really important to us that consumers can access most of what we build into our products. We do it all the time with individual customers on the phone. We have some amazing people at REL who will spend an hour and a half, two hours over the course of a few conversations. Go to your receiver, pull up this menu, do this, then call me back and I’ll give you some values to put in. And they do it, and suddenly, God, that sounds so much better. Human beings are still better than computers at this.

You ran Sumiko and worked across all kinds of audio equipment, where you could shape how a whole system sounds. Now the focus is specifically subwoofers. How did that narrowing change the way you think about your work?

Great question. When my partner Donald Brody and I owned SUMIKO, we identified a very few truly special brands (Sonus faber, Vienna Acoustics and REL come to mind) and worked closely with their designers to bring forth products that were perfect for the market. So even then, I was heavily involved in design, working with some of the best teams in the loudspeaker market. Seeing that my contributions to their efforts gave me confidence that my instincts were sound. When we took over REL, I applied those same lessons. Perhaps one of the reasons our subwoofers are seen and experienced as appropriate for inclusion in the highest end sound systems is because I design subwoofers from a speaker designer’s perspective. I voice drivers, for example, using exactly the same techniques I learned from those designers. I listen broadband to the entirety of the musical bandwidth, I don’t design just to make bass. This approach seems to work exceptionally well for us.

Sound is having a real renaissance right now, with people caring about it again in a new way. Where does REL fit into that, and what’s your read on what people want from audio in 2026?

Our key markets are actually growing every year, which is remarkable, because a lot of companies in our industry are still down 10, 15, 20% after the COVID bubble. During COVID a certain number of people returned to music and realized it was the stuff they enjoyed most, and for us that’s held ever since. A lot of it comes down to the close linkage we have with our customers, our distributors and our dealers, because we have teams out there teaching every day.

One of the huge opportunities I see is the listening bars popping up. I think it’s so cool. Having rich, delicate, tuneful bass that can fill an entire space is such a natural fit for them. We were in one in Soho, All Blues, that was doing it all correctly. Five or six pairs of vintage horn speakers, stacks of vintage McIntosh amplifiers, an entire wall of vinyl for the DJs to choose from. It was calm, moody, beautifully balanced, and there was this real respect for the environment. You could feel a kind of oneness in the room. There’s a real opportunity for REL to reach into that community and show them what we can do.

Your background is in high-end retail on both the car and home side, and REL’s designs keep getting more elegant, the wood grilles, the new colorways. How does that retail past shape the way you think about design today, and who REL is really for?

I’ve been working with luxury clients my entire career; it provides a long-term perspective into what our clients want and appreciate in our design language. I love tiny details that have a huge impact on how a surface reflects or catches light, or beautiful metalwork that adds just the right touch to a design. I study women’s handbags; the great ones are a master’s class in attention to detail and finish quality. My wife is the beneficiary of this research (laughs). New design ideas come to me all the time. I just found a new, tiny boutique company based in England that makes these amazing paints. We’re always looking and studying ways to design and build products that are more refined, more beautiful than our previous works. We’re insatiably curious and never take our customers for granted. Don’t forget, REL is simply the first syllable in relentless.

Last one, and maybe the fun one. What’s the next thing you’re curious about? Is there a problem you wish you could solve, or something you’re itching to try?

From the outside it seems as though subwoofers are mature, sort of a “surely everything has been done by now” thing. But the reality is there are simply so many ways our lives have changed and evolved over the past twenty years, and that evolution continues daily. In much of our country, indoor/outdoor living is how we live our lives six months a year. I wouldn’t mind taking a whack at developing beautiful subwoofers for outdoor environments.

I also still need to make time to finish up our in-wall project. Surprisingly, the high performance aspect came easily to us. I say surprisingly because when you have just 3.6 inches of depth to work with, deep bass is a legitimate challenge. But our work that resulted in the recent launch of Planar thin panel subwoofers pays dividends here. What I need time to sort out is the minimization of noise pollution inside the wall produced by high performance in-wall subwoofers. Great subwoofers produce huge amounts of vibration, which makes everything inside your wall rattle.

The list of ways to evolve REL gets longer, not shorter, which is a good thing. And yes, I’d love to do a short line of speakers. Nothing like these huge lines with 1400 variations of 157 models. Just something special that matters to the right people. And I’d like to see if we can’t do it at somewhat reasonable prices. While I admire some of the work that results in these ultra high end lines where life begins at $20,000 a pair, I’ve got to believe we could deliver something special at far less.


Images courtesy of REL Acoustics