Next up in our Sound Matters feature series we shine a light on Japanese hi-fi speaker company and long-standing collaborator with Mr Bongo, Higo Beat. Masterminded by Billy Wood, the idea for Higo Beat was planted in 2016 but didn’t fully materialise until after COVID hit in 2020. Sourced, crafted and constructed in Japan, Higo Beat speakers follow a simple ethos, namely that ‘music should enhance a space and bring people together - not disappear into the background’. 

For the past 6 years, Billy and the team have been making a range of speakers that focus on clarity, balance, and long-term listening comfort, without technical complexity or constant adjustment. Some are designed for home listening, others for powering dancefloors and event spaces. Regardless of purpose, each follows that same attention to detail, hand-built in Kumamoto using wood from the forests surrounding their workshop. The result is stunning, unpretentious, undemanding speakers that offer fidelity, clarity and a visceral experience.

We have been very fortunate to work with Higo Beat for a number of years now. Our in-store parties in Brighton have been powered by their Irogami 8 series and our recent refit for the store features the Yamori 5’s. As well as our principles aligning, so do our musical tastes and we’ve embarked on two collaborative tours of Japan in recent years. Bringing Luke Una and DJ Nature with us, each tour has seen us play a series of parties, events and popups, showcasing the speakers of Higo Beat and the music of Mr Bongo.

We sat down with Billy Wood, to get an insight into his journey from building speakers in Brighton to moving to Japan and setting up Higo Beat, what makes their speakers unique and what the future holds.

How did you get into building speakers? 
 
I came to Brighton just before the millennium to study design. It turns out the city puts on a good party. I started DJing in the backroom of Concorde 2 and built my first sound system for that. It just developed from there really. I fell in with a crew that was putting sound in for all the big Drum 'n' Bass raves and started building speakers for them as well. The next few years were quite an intense period of rigging sound for many parties and building speakers to support that. The phone kept ringing, so I kept helping people out with sound.

You moved over to a rural corner of Japan from Brighton over 10 years ago. What drew you over there from the UK?

Kumamoto wasn't a random choice - it's somewhere I already had ties to, and somewhere I'd come to properly appreciate over the years before the move ever happened. I first came to Japan while I was still studying design, and ended up at places like Maniac Love and Space Lab Yellow. That's really where the connection started - long before I had any reason to think I'd end up living here.

Over the years, the Brighton business matured from those early days of building sound systems for raves. It got to a point where I was providing sound for over ten events every week and worked 100 hours to make it all happen. There wasn't much life left outside of it. When the workload got unsustainable, Japan was the obvious place to actually slow down.

Taking a step back from constant gigs every week enabled me to concentrate again on design. Although I had been making speakers for years, I was always too busy to push the design as far as I wanted.

From those early days, how did the concept of Higo Beat come to life?

It took a long time, and a lot of it was just learning from people who knew more than me. In Brighton I was lucky enough to be around an older generation of sound system operators and acoustic engineers, and most of what I actually know came from watching and listening to them, more than anything I worked out myself.

For the first few years after moving to Japan, I was still running the UK business from a desk, with good people on the ground handling the day to day. So the idea of doing something properly local didn't really start until 2016 following the big earthquake that happened in Kumamoto that same year.  It got me thinking about building things closer to where I actually was, using what was actually around me, rather than running something remotely. I started playing with the idea of speakers made from local timber around then. But the timing wasn't right yet - it was more of a seed than a plan.

Not long after, I ended up designing for a speaker manufacturer just north of Chicago whilst still living in Japan. Great team, learned a huge amount from them professionally. The commute nearly finished me off, but the work was worth it. Oh yeh, that was when I designed the sound system for Tania Bruguera's Tate Modern installation soundtracked by Kode9. But anyway, the whole time, that idea from Kumamoto was still sitting in the background - a locally made speaker company, properly rooted somewhere.

When the world shut down in 2020, the timing finally made sense, and that's when Higo Beat actually started. In case you were wondering, Higo is what the Kumamoto area was called in samurai days.

What is it that makes a Higo Beat speaker unique?

Everything starts in the forests around our workshop. We have a strong partnership with our local sawmill. They are one of the few that can prepare timber to our specification. The sawmill started in 1950 and specialise in Oguni Sugi (Cedar). They now also provide us with Hinoki (Cypress) which is a timber traditionally used in Japanese temples. We also use Hokkaido birch for some of our bigger systems.

The workshop itself is an old cowshed - built in the Taisho era, back when a building that size for animals said something about how people valued their livestock. I could've knocked the cowshed down and started fresh, would've been cheaper. But you don't get that history back once it's gone, so we restored it instead. That's genuinely where the speakers get assembled panel by panel, then finished - sanded, oiled by hand with a modified linseed oil.

The precision cutting happens at our own CNC facility down the road. We machine our speakers ourselves. They are not sent out to a box builder somewhere to save time. The CNC machine does what a machine's good at. Precision. Then the panels come back to the cowshed and it's hands from there. That combination - precision where you need it, a person where you need that instead - is the whole process, really. One speaker at a time, start to finish, all of it in Japan.

The bit people don't always clock is where the years I spent building sound for Brighton's club scene actually shows up. It's not in the specs. It's that these speakers come out of a sound system culture - a crowd, a DJ booth, a room full of people, not one person alone with a hi-fi rack. We build speakers to bring people together. At the end of the day, it is about enjoying good music together.

How do you test the speakers? Is there a go-to record you use to analyse their dynamics?

Each speaker is carefully measured before it leaves the workshop, with calibrated microphones and modern analysis tools. But I use different records for different things too. After years in Pro Audio, I still use 'Somewhere, Somebody' by Jennifer Warnes to check tonal balance - I've heard that record on so many different systems in so many different rooms that it tells me a lot. Boring, I know. But sometimes boring works.
If I want to check dynamics on a big system, it's Ashley Beedle's Return To The Factory remix of Stac's 'Glory'. That kick and that bass will make an inadequate sound system fall over very quickly.

By balancing measurement with actual listening, we make sure the sound stays alive.
When our speakers leave the workshop in Kumamoto, they're ready for a new home. We know that's a considered choice, and we're honoured by the trust it shows. The reward comes when someone hears their favourite records with new clarity and detail.

What was the inspiration behind the technical design of the speakers?

Honestly, most of it comes from talking to people. Finding out what they actually love about music, what they're listening for, what a room feels like to them when it's right.
I've noticed I get more out of a conversation with someone who knows nothing technical and just loves music than I do with someone who can quote me a frequency response off the top of their head. The geek tells me what they think they should say. The music lover tells me the truth - what actually moves them, what makes them stay in a room a bit longer, what makes them turn a record over and play it again.

So a good part of the job is just being out, listening to good music, talking to people about it. Then I go back to the workshop and try to build something that gets closer to what they were actually describing.

Over the years I have learnt enough about the technical side to turn what someone tells me into something real. But the starting point's never a spec sheet. It's a conversation.

How have the speakers developed over time?

The manufacturing wasn't always set up the way it is now. For a while, we ran a split model - cabinets built locally to wherever they'd be sold, so we'd cut down on logistics and carbon footprint. On paper, it made sense.

In practice, that meant a subcontractor building cabinets in the UK, and me flying back over to do final assembly. The UK product used different materials and a slightly modified design, built to suit how people listen together in the UK. We built in batches and held stock, which is its own kind of business entirely.

What we noticed was that people were more interested in the Japanese-made product than the UK-made one. That told us something the original plan hadn't quite accounted for - the place it's made is part of what people are actually buying into.

So when we committed to buying our own CNC machine, we consolidated the core of our manufacturing under our own control - cutting and finishing, start to finish, ourselves. It made quality easier to oversee, and it cut out a layer of complexity that, looking back, we probably didn't need.

Are there different factors that you consider when building speakers for home listening compared to those used in an event setting?

I find most home hi-fi boring to listen to. They lack the visceral experience of a club. When building speakers for the home, I want to bring that same feeling home. Also, if you want speakers for the house, they must be a beautiful piece of furniture.

When you want speakers for an event setting, they still need the fidelity and clarity people expect at home. The speakers just need to be louder.

Do you have any new products or ranges that you’re working on? What does the future hold for Higo Beat?

When Gareth and Jane were over last year for the Mr Bongo x Higo Beat Japan tour, they DJed on something I'd been working on for a while - what's becoming the Nami range. In a lot of ways it's going back to my roots. Nami is bigger than anything Higo Beat has done before, built to bring the same approach into bigger spaces and louder rooms - the kind of scale I spent years building systems for long before Higo Beat existed.

But honestly, whatever we build next, the reason for doing any of it stays the same. I just want to keep finding good music with good people. That's it really.

Big thanks to Billy for taking the time out to speak to us for this feature. Head to their website for more information on all things Higo Beat.