Cycling, the grappling arts, dogs, and music/stereos have pretty much all that I've been interested in my entire life. I had kind of hoped I'd become a rock star so I didn't really pay much attention in high school.  Sadly, electric guitars, girls and parties seemed more important at the time.  Fairly quickly  the rock star dream began fall apart.  When I finished high school I began working for a really high end pool and snooker table company building pool tables. So with that I began to learn a bit  more than I'd learned in woodworking class.  I had a great boss who taught me so much about everything life was going to throw at me.  He's still one of my favourite human beings.  

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When the recession came in '08 I got manhandled like a punk kid,  The recession decimated both the pool table industry as well as my own business.  I decided to move to a bigger city and work there.  10 days into living there  some cement-head who didn't know how to ride a bike crashed into me at top speed and destroyed my spine.  I couldn't work for nearly a year.  So the recession was really just overkill.  The accident was what really ruined me, and I had a baby on the way. 

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For a few years after I recovered I continued building some pool tables, coffee tables, dinner tables etc and then someone asked me why did I not try and build a unit for my stereo so it could come out of the wall unit?  Hmmm not a bad idea.  I built my first real rack in early 2015.  I'd always been into audio so I knew what was out there.   The wood racks that were available looked ok but were poorly built (seeing them at shows later confirmed my suspicions),  Thankfully all but one of them has gone out of business now.   The aluminum ones didn't look too bad either but they were designed around slick marketing and not vibration mitigation.  As hardcore road cyclist I was keenly aware of the differences materials play in deferring and dissipating nano vibrations .  I knew metal racks, even if they made a half-assed attempt at isolation, would still be sub par.  Hard woods would be the king but they needed to be built correctly.  I borrowed a few techniques from the pool table industry where tables needed to be 100% stable and vibration free.  Then I began to experiment with tone woods.  

 

I showed my first rack on a Facebook hifi group and  quickly got  my first real dealer.  I started doing all the audio shows that year and enjoyed some magazine coverage, lots of kind words on the forums and audio groups .  I began sharing audio rooms with all the best hifi companies from ModWright to Soulution and EgglstonWorks to Magico.

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In 2018, I acquired custody of my son and relocated from downtown Toronto to Waterloo, ON. Living in the big city, paying for a home and small business costs as well as raising a little guy by myself would have been impossible.  Since I didn't need  a showroom, it didn't really matter where I had my shop. The Waterloo region was much cheaper and the cycling was/is much better.  

 

 I currently have a shop on a farm 15 min outside of town surrounded by farm fields, apple orchards and road side corn and maple syrup stands.  A lot different than the first shop that was about 6 blocks from the CN Tower.

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 Unlike the recession, the  pandemic turned out to be very kind to the audio industry and to me as well, and I'm still plugging away. Massif is a fun company to run and I intend on doing it until its ceases being so.  Thanks for visiting my site.  

                                                                                                    -Trev

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