BDDW's Handmade Record Players

When Tyler Hays founded BDDW more than a decade ago, the company wore many hats: depending on the project, it might be a design-build construction company, a recording studio, an architecture firm, or a furniture business. Over time Hays narrowed BDDW's focus down to furniture—"that's the scale I prefer to work in," he says—but he's kept his own interests remarkably broad. "I've got literally fifty hobbies," he told me over the phone, when I called to chat about one of his sideline projects: making exquisite, and exquisitely expensive, custom record players and speakers for audiophiles, under the name Phila Audio Corporation. Hays defines 'audiophile' as "a person who likes to spend too much money on stupid audio equipment," and he counts himself among them. He's been making high-end, handmade audio equipment since college, but now that he's got a fabrication shop, he makes every part of every piece of equipment, down to the bearings, excluding the motor and stylus on the record players and the drivers on the speakers.