A History of Geshelli Labs: The Little Audio Company That Could.

Geshelli Labs didn’t start as a plan for an audio company; to this day, we still walk the dog at night and wonder how we got here. We believe that never taking anything for granted and staying humble has helped with our continuation and growth. With every show we attend and every phone call and email we answer, we know that without the support of the audio community, we wouldn’t be able to work as a family and continue on this path. We feel blessed to be able to bring our passion for music and gear into people’s homes. We are as excited now as we were at the beginning of this adventure.

Geno is a tinkerer and loves music and gear but the idea of creating his own equipment started as a child. Growing up, his family didn’t have extra money for anything besides the essentials. Even then, there were times when there wasn’t enough food, utilities were disconnected, and at one point, nowhere to call home. Radio Shack and discarded electronics were Geno’s solace and how he originally learned his trade. He would go to friends’ houses, and see gaming systems, and knowing he couldn’t have one, he set out to make something like it. As a teenager, Geno had made his own gaming system, Pinball Machine, and started diving into computer programming using an old Tandy Coco that his brother had.

During his childhood, growing up in the inner city of Pittsburgh, there may not have been money, but there was always music. His dad Joe is a prodigy Trumpet player and spent most of his life in bands. Coming from a large Italian family, all the brothers played different instruments, so it was a natural progression to them all playing together. Geno’s mom grew up in rural Alabama. She came from a large African American family, and she always had a song to sing or instruments to play. Geno himself is an accomplished Bass player and drawing from that background allowed him to learn and understand how to draw the best sound from music. His exposure to music and the various genres from two very different parental backgrounds serves him well when working in the audio world. After graduating High School, to help make ends meet, Geno started working in the hardware field while attending college.

A man named Mike Zaffuto took Geno under his wing. He taught Geno old-school electronics that they were not teaching any more in college. Geno and Mike were part of the team that made the devices to give folks with ALS a voice. The two of them loved audio and they would talk about how someday they would design an audio product together. After Geno left Pittsburgh in 2008, they lost touch with each other.

Fast forward to 2016 and Geno decided to make his own DAC. He would sit at night while Sherri was busy with the kids and lay out different board designs. He tried out a few of the designs, hand soldering all the components, and one of them was incredible. Like nothing we’ve heard before. Sherri immediately decided we should see what we could do with this and encouraged him to make another. Rachel, our daughter was a young teen and was going through a phase where she was switching the letters of our name around and calling us by that name. Geno became ENOG and she drove him nuts calling him that. We built a second DAC, called it ENOG, and put it on eBay. Immediately, an Enlisted Soldier from a local Air Force Base bought it. Within a week, he asked if we could make a few more for his friends. That turned into making many more at night while working full-time during the day. Because we shared an office at the company we worked at, we spent all of our free time discussing how to grow this into a business. We decided to give the company a name and Geno came up with shouting a piece of a word and Sherri would finish it. He yelled “JA”, Sherri yelled “Shell” and we threw an “E” on the end for good measure. The name stuck and “Geshelli” was born. Since then, all of our product names have something to do with names that have meaning to us. We’ve introduced the Archel/Rachel, Erish/Sherri, JNOG/Jacob, Dayzee/our dog, and homage to “Z” from Zreviews, and Mike Zafuto gets the Zoofa.

Every evening Geno and Sherri were soldering DAC boards by hand in the garage. We purchased a laser cutter, and Rachel would peel the plexi and assemble the units. Jake our son would pack and ship. We moved to metal cases and to save costs, Sherri learned to Powder Coat. Back then, there were very few color options for audio. Sherri decided instead of the same gray, silver, and black cases, she was going to make Purple, Reds, Greens, and Blues. Utilizing the plexi for our front and back plates and adding interior LED lights helped Geshelli stand out from the crowd.

The turning point for Geshelli came when “Z” from Zreviews acquired our DAC and featured it on his channel declaring it one of the best DACs he’s ever used. From that point on, there was no turning back.

After the success of our first DAC, Geno continued to design and make a small headphone amplifier. At that point, we were still very unknown but had some momentum through ZReviews talking about us. The kids were all in on continuing, Geno bought a small Pick and Place Machine which was in the living room, and Sherri was Powder Coating inside a scrap wood box that Geno built and laser cutting in the garage.

It was an interesting time and everything in the garage was covered in Purple Powder Coat. We continued running Geshelli out of our house until 2018 when we convinced Geno to move Geshelli out of our house and into a rented space. Our first unit was next to the train tracks, looked like it was constructed from sheet metal and duct tape, and every time a train went by, it shook, and pieces of roof metal fell on our heads. Coupled with no AC in the Florida heat, it made us long to be back in our house garage.

By the start of 2020, we had worked our way up to renting a Brick/Mortar facility and had multiple full PCB Assembly lines, laser cutters, and a professional Powder coating facility. Geno asked his dad to make a wood case for our first audio show in Florida. Geno wanted something that was solid wood and handmade. At that show, once folks saw the beautiful handmade case everything changed for Joe.

He went from being retired in Pittsburgh and happily working part-time at Lowes, to moving to Florida and reluctantly coming aboard Geshelli full-time. By the end of the year, we had both of the kids, our son’s fiancé’ Courtney, and Grandpa Joe all working at the shop making DACs and Headphone Amplifiers.

During the Pandemic, Geno started talking about his friend and mentor Mike and decided to see if he could find him. He found his wife on a social media site, reached out, and spent the entire weekend speaking to him on the phone. They slept maybe a handful of hours through the weekend. It was an important reunion because Mike’s passion for audio gear was still prominent, and he and Geno now could follow through on the promise they made to each other long ago.

Mike Zaffuto was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and was working full-time. Every evening for months, Geno and Mike would pour over each other’s design schematics. Mike bridged the gap between Geno’s knowledge and vice versa. Mike started a company called Zooftech and Geno and Mike are a force together. Within that first year, they designed a two-channel class A/B amp named the Zoofa and a dual DAC named the Dayzee. Upcoming is a Pre-Amp and a set of Monoblocks that Geshelli just passed CE certification for.

In 2021, coming out of the pandemic, a rough time for all, Geshelli had some amazing opportunities that we grabbed onto. Randy, from the YouTube Channel Cheap Audio Man, contacted us about borrowing a product to check out. If he liked it, he would do a review, if he didn’t, he’d still do a review. We took a chance, and he did indeed like it.

That introduced a whole new audience to our products, and we leveled up and grew enough to expand our little shop and rent the unit next door. Then the amazing wood carver Chris O’Neill of O’Neill’s Creation and Grumpy Goose contacted us to see if we were interested in his headphone stands. That led to Geshelli borrowing some stands to bring to the Florida Audio Expo in early 2022.

Talk about a showpiece, folks were clamoring to purchase them. That small collaboration led to Chris surprising us with an incredible hand-carved case. If you haven’t seen Chris’s art, you’re in for a treat. His talent is unparalleled, and he and Geshelli have been working together ever since. The Florida Audio Show was the first show after the pandemic. Many reviewers and YouTubers came and met us and the staff. We were fortunate to offer something different, with funky room designs and product styles. Geshelli was featured in multiple articles including right here on Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. That show, and the press received gave us another new group of folks who were not aware of Geshelli.

And then there was Andrew Sparks from Sparko’s Labs, a US family-based opamp maker. In December 2022, Andrew and Geno were introduced by a mutual customer Michael Bruce, after many folks saw on YouTube that he was modifying our DAC and adding Sparko’s opamps. Geno and Andrew hit it off immediately and a new collaboration formed. The two of them worked together to create a socketed DAC using Sparko’s opamps. That DAC’s success led to the Archel3/Erish3 headphone amplifiers featuring Sparko’s 2590 opamps.

In the last two years, we have also expanded our staff. We have Bri, who is Rachel’s childhood best friend and is now running our PCB lines and assembling Dayzee’s, Amanda who is learning every aspect of the production side and has taken over surface mount soldering, Caitlin who is in shipping and our newest member is Bob who was the founder of Sound Anchors and is Courtney’s stepdad.

Besides HIFI Audio, Geshelli and Zooftech have branched out and are doing some exciting design and production at the OEM level for other companies. Having the ability to design and produce our own PCB boards and in some cases, components has allowed us to expand our offerings to both Audio Companies and Commercial ventures. Don’t be surprised if you come across a very familiar case design housing something completely different than a DAC, headphone amplifier, or another audio company’s product with the DAC board being from Geshelli. We hope in the future to continue to expand and grow while never losing focus on where we came from and who got us to where we are.