The designer

GRZEGORZ RULKA

Your system, your room, your ears. I am here to help you get there.

Over 1,000 orders shipped to listeners in more than forty countries. Every one of them dealt with me, not a sales desk.

MSc engineer in technical physics, twenty years designing fullrange drivers and loudspeakers, co-founder of Cube Audio and Qualio Audio — all of which exists so that I can give you a straight answer about your system.

Write to me

01 / I know what you are after

You have been told to pick a side. You should not have to.

I have spent twenty years and a great deal of my own money chasing the same thing you are. I know exactly how that search feels, which is why I will not sell you half of it.

What we are both after

Brutally fast. Dynamic. Precise and contoured. Transparent to the point of being uncomfortable with a bad recording. Detailed, holographic, three-dimensional, totally immersive.

And at the same time — never sharp, never thin. Dense, full-bodied, with real colour and beautiful tone.

What you have probably already paid for

Detailed and holographic, but dry and bleached

Warm and colourful, but slow and smeared

Impressive for an hour, exhausting by the third record

Any sentence that begins “for the money, it’s…”

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

Oscar Wilde

02 / Background

Let my experience improve your system.

You are about to ask a stranger on the internet what to do with your system. Here is what stands behind the reply you will get.

Degree

MSc, technical physics

Master of Science Engineer. The maths behind a driver motor is not something I look up — it is what I was trained in.

Also studied

Nanotechnology

Materials at the scale where their behaviour stops being intuitive — which is exactly where cone and damping materials live.

Postgraduate

Nuclear energetics

An unusual line on an audio CV. It teaches you to respect measurement, tolerance and what happens when you guess.

In practice

20+ years in audio

Fullrange drivers designed and manufactured from scratch, crossovers, cabinets. Every part of a loudspeaker, built with my own hands at some point.

Where it started

I grew up on fullrange loudspeakers, which is where the obsession comes from. My first venture was a Polish distribution company with a small audio salon, carrying Docet Lector of Italy, Raysonic — a tube house very close in spirit to Ayon Audio, now gone — and JC Verdier turntables. Selling other people’s high end for a few years is the fastest education there is in what is worth the money and what is not.

03 / Cube Audio

We built the drivers first, then the loudspeakers around them.

Co-founded with Marek Kostrzyński. Almost nobody in high end does it in this order — and it is the whole reason Cube sounds the way it does.

The F8 Neo from behind the baffle — CNC-machined motor, the milled suspension, and a cone assembly with three whizzers on it.

One driver, no crossover, and a cabinet whose only job is to load it. Everything else was removed.

No crossover

One driver, the whole range

A true fullrange driver needs no crossover at all. Nothing splits the signal, nothing shifts its timing — which is where the holography and the directness come from.

Made from scratch

Cones and voice coils, by hand

Designed, wound and assembled in Poland. The F10 Neo motor holds 81 neodymium magnets, 1,480 grams of them, delivering 2.4 Tesla across a 9 mm gap — machined to 0.01 mm on CNC lathes.

The hard part

Measuring perfectly, sounding dull

We built cone geometries a studio monitor would envy on paper, and they sounded boring. The answer took four cones, a CNC-milled suspension of our own and over a year of failures — and taught me the thing I still work by: the measurement is not the goal.

“A rethink on what a 21st-century fullrange driver can be. It incorporates clever engineering not seen elsewhere. And it works.”

On the Nenuphar

“Reviewing the Nenuphar was a personal highlight in going on two decades of reviewing here and elsewhere.”

Srajan Ebaen · 6moons

Cube Audio still runs, still designs its own transducers, and still sells through more than thirty distributors worldwide.

Visit Cube Audio

04 / Qualio Audio

Then we opened the baffle — halfway.

Qualio builds multiway semi open baffle loudspeakers: the bass drivers stay loaded in a bass-reflex box, while the midrange and high frequencies radiate open, with no enclosure behind them at all.

Qualio IQ. The bass driver is boxed; above it the midrange and the AMT sit on an acrylic panel with open air behind them.

From an angle the point is obvious: there is nothing behind the mid and top to store energy and give it back late.

The architecture

Box where it helps, open where it hurts

A cabinet is an asset below a hundred hertz and a liability above it. So the bass keeps its bass-reflex box, and the mid and top get nothing behind them — no back wave, no stored energy, no boxy colouration.

The IQ

The model that started Qualio

An open mid and top with a Mundorf AMT reaching 31 kHz, over a box-loaded bass driver. The first loudspeaker Qualio shipped, and still the one most people meet the brand through.

Now

Four models, still growing

IQ, IQ 30, Quantum and Quanteen. Reviewed by Mono & Stereo, HiFi Pig, HiFi Knights, Darko.Audio and Steve Huff.

“Exotic high end audiophile sound for much less cost, while never skimping on quality or making any real compromise.”

Steve Huff · Best of 2024

“A highly immersive sound experience that neither shies away from nuances nor is astray from bringing details to life.”

Matej Isak · Mono & Stereo

Sold factory direct, so the money buys parts and labour instead of a supply chain — the model I now use for Virtual HiFi too.

Visit Qualio Audio

05 / Now

Everything I have learned now goes into one place.

Twenty years of drivers, crossovers, cabinets and two companies — and Virtual HiFi is the first one with no brief except the one I set myself.

No compromises. No committee. No price bracket to hit. The best sound I am capable of making — and nothing else deciding it.

At Cube the drivers set the brief. At Qualio the price set the brief. Here the only question I have to answer is whether it sounds better than what I had yesterday — and I get to answer it with my own hands, in my own room, every day.

Nothing here started as a business plan. I roll op-amps because I want to hear what a chip does. I build isolation footers because I want to know what the floor is taking away. The experiments that survive become products.

Cube and Qualio run on, with Marek and the teams. This is the one I am in every day, from the first prototype to the crate that leaves the workshop.

Supernova in the studio, on its own wheels — designed, built and finished at Virtual HiFi.

Supernova

Open baffle, cost no object

See Supernova

Vermillion Power

Where I tell people to start

See the cables

Vibron

Isolation footers, printed elastomer

See Vibron

Op-amps

Paralleled, five minutes to fit

See the op-amps

See Supernova

See the cables

See Vibron

See the op-amps

06 / The channel

I make the sound demos I wanted to watch.

I spend a great deal of time on YouTube myself, and the comparisons I found most useful were always the ones where you could actually hear the difference. So I started recording them properly.

Judge the recording quality for yourself. Same room, same chain, same levels — headphones recommended.

The chain

Over $10,000 in recording gear alone, so the demo is worth listening to.

Maag Audio PRE Q2 into a Zoom F3, Schoeps pair on Vermillion XLR — the preamp standing on Vibron footers, like everything else in the room.

Microphones

Schoeps CMC6 MK4

A matched cardioid pair. The same microphones used for classical recording, because that is the standard the demo has to meet.

Preamplifier

Maag Audio PRE Q2

Two channels of studio-grade gain ahead of the converter. The microphones only sound like themselves if nothing between them and the recorder adds a character of its own.

Recorder

Zoom F3, 32-bit float

32-bit float means no gain riding and no clipping. What the microphones heard is what the recording holds.

Cabling

Vermillion XLR

Our own silver-gold alloy interconnects. If a cable were going to colour a demo, it would be this one — so it is the one I trust.

The rule

Only one thing changes

Same room, same chain, same levels, same track. Swap one component and nothing else. Otherwise the comparison proves nothing.

Beyond YouTube

If YouTube’s compression is getting in the way, take the original file.

When you are serious about a particular device, the original 32-bit float, 192 kHz recording sits alongside each written review. Put on your best headphones and hear what actually changed.

Video reviews

Reviews and sound demonstrations of audiophile electronics of every kind — recorded in the Virtual HiFi studio.

Watch the channel

07 / The people this is for

You are the one this is about.

I do not design for reviewers or for show rooms. I design for the person sitting in a chair at home at eleven at night, and over a thousand of them have let me help so far.

1,000+

orders shipped worldwide across the full Virtual HiFi range

40+

countries, from a workshop in Poznań

Direct

every conversation with the person who designed it

30 days

to decide at home, with shipping free both ways

“Out of curiosity I bought the Supersonic V1 and V2 and compared them to Sparkos. I’m shocked — Supersonic was better. This combo easily won against the Audiolab 7000A and Marantz M1.”

Tomasz Ostrowski · op-amps

“The difference was immediately audible — clarity and micro detail first, then the airiness and focus increased enormously. Bass is very clean and deep, in layers I had not heard before.”

Harold K. · op-amps

“The richest, most defined sound I have obtained from this unit so far. Greater richness, density and light, with the same definition.”

Massimo Morlacchi · op-amps

6moons, HiFi Knights, Passion for Sound and Steve Huff have all reviewed what I build. But the reviews that decide what I make next come from owners.

Ask me anything

Talk to me directly

Your turn. Tell me your room and your system.

Write, and I will tell you what I would do in your position. I will help you set the whole thing up, advise on what to pair with what, and stay available afterwards for as long as it takes. If something I make is wrong for you, I will say so — that is worth more to me than one more sale.