Welcome 2026

I've always enjoyed the New Year holiday. It is less stressful than other holidays. No pressure to buy gifts or make a huge meal. The focus is on enjoying the time and personal renewal.

I've spent the past couple days thinking about the journey I've been on with Cathode Bias. I never planned to get involved with HiFi as a small business, it just evolved that way. When we were living in Miami, I was looking for a subwoofer which would match my Altec 604 speakers. I ended up buying a Fostex 31" subwoofer driver with no cabinet. I looked for someone to help with the construction, but got no takers. I had no choice but to build the cabinet. I spent a month building a massive 12' cabinet out of construction lumber which started me on this path.

At the time, I was still content to modify my own system and tinker on some tube amplifier projects. My real dream was to open a Jazz Kissa style listening room. During this period my Instagram started to get more followers and I received an inquiry about building commercial speakers. With the growth of listening rooms this conversation grabbed my attention, and I outsourced the construction of the cabinets for my first Altec style system with multi-cellular horns and assembled the system. Of course the original inquiry never came to fruition, but I couldn't drop the idea of supporting the growing listening room market.

Ultimately my wife and I decided to buy an old warehouse in Reno, NV in an attempt to scale the business. I've owned a house in Tahoe since the early 2000s, so it was basically home. I still didn't plan to build cabinets myself, but I wanted to experiment, so I started building prototypes. I realized not only was it hard to find a reliable partner to build cabinets, I enjoyed the process of building. So I started building speakers myself; mainly out of a 400 sq ft garage workshop in my free time.

But Reno wasn't working out. While there were some business reasons (the building need a lot work to convert to a viable listening room), ultimately we decided to sell the building and move back to Florida for personal reasons. To be honest it has been a whirlwind, but I feel like we are finding footing again in Florida. I have a new shop and have finished my first two projects there, and my aspirations have aligned with the reality of this industry.

So what now? Like I said, I've scaled down my expectations significantly, but plan to continue building speakers as a serious hobby. My focus this year is going to be on the Mini-Modesta sound system. Which combines a 10" woofer and a small horn with a horn loaded subwoofer. I like this design as it combines many of my learnings from the past few years into a neat package. I'm cautiously optimistic, but realistic about it too. I'm just taking the next step that seems to make sense and see where that leads me. And the next step is to build some Mini-Modesta subwoofers – back to my build plans.

Thanks again for all the support. Have a great 2026. I'm always available in email (baus@cathodebias.com) and IG DM (@cathodebias).