About this collection
Campfire Audio started with a plant pathologist. Ken Ball ran a USDA lab for years before his real hobby, hi-fi, took over, beginning in his basement with a hand-built iPod line-out cable he couldn't buy anywhere else. That project grew into Audio Line Out in 2009, and later ALO Audio, one of the most respected names in personal audio cables and amplifiers. Six years in, Ball and Caleb Rosenau launched Campfire Audio as a dedicated in-ear monitor brand, and it's been based out of a workshop in inner southeast Portland ever since.
Campfire's first three earphones, Orion, Jupiter, and Lyra, launched in the summer of 2015, and Lyra alone was notable for having the industry's first all-ceramic IEM body. But it was the Andromeda, released the following year, that really established the brand: an angular, machined-metal shell design that looked like nothing else on the market, paired with a five-driver balanced armature tuning that became an instant reference point for the segment. That distinctive faceted metalwork, inspired partly by the surrounding Pacific Northwest landscape, is still the visual signature people associate with Campfire.
Since then the lineup has grown past 45 models, with the team continuing to push driver technology as hard as design, including the Beryllium PVD driver, the 3D-printed T.A.E.C. acoustic expansion chamber, and the Amorphous Diamond-Like Carbon dynamic driver used in the Atlas. Every earphone is still hand-assembled by a small team of around 20 people in that same Portland workshop, the same basement-cable ethos Ball started with in 2009, just scaled up into one of the most recognizable names in high-end IEMs.