The Epifani Story

Epifani was founded by Nick Epifani in 1994. The roots of Epifani go way back to another time and place: Italy, where Nick was born.
 
Before making music equipment, Nick was a working musician, playing guitar and drums. While he studied electronics in Italy, Nick’s path to the USA came as a singer and guitar player. However, it was not long after Nick arrived here that he found himself re-engineering other people’s designs. He did it because he saw the flaws that no one else seemed to notice—something not right in cabinet construction, or a woofer that didn’t move properly. So Nick fixed them just to get the sound he was looking for. People started to notice the improvements.

Shortly after, so did top guitar amp companies, like Fane, who hired him to work on their designs as well as make cabinets for Bruno amps and many others. But, while guitar was easy, bass was much harder. He started out building just a few bass cabinets, but bassists lining up to get them.  So, Nick decided it was time to put down his guitar and start the bass cabinet business for real. The Epifani brand got underway officially in 1994.
 
Epifani started out by building their cabinets by hand, one at a time. Nick worked tirelessly with driver manufacturer, Eminence, innovating designs which have been adopted around the industry. Epifani grew day by day, cabinet by cabinet.

The Big Breakthrough

In 1994, Nick met Joey and Vinnie of Fodera, the best bass makers in the world. Their artist list included Victor Wooten, Matthew Garrison, Anthony Jackson, Victor Bailey, Reggie Young, James Genus, and many other world-renowned bassists.  

When Fodera heard Nick’s cabinets, they were thrilled, stating that Epifani gear let them hear their basses properly for the first time. Fodera then introduced Nick to their roster of artists.  Nick built a 2×12 for Matt Garrison. Then a 3×10 to help Lincoln Goines compete with Dennis Chambers’s powerful drum sound. And then Nick met his supreme client, a musician who knows exactly what he wants. Baltic Birch woods, silver wiring, custom drivers. That client was none other than Anthony Jackson, who pushed the company to go where no cabinet company has gone before.
 
The products, that put Epifani in the minds of bassists around the world, were the NYC Line, and then the UL Line cabinets. The UL line changed the perception of what a bass cabinet can be—a more accurate sound yet far less weight. In fact, UL cabinets were half the weight of the typical bass box, delivering more low-end and significantly cleaner tone.
 
While Epifani did start as a custom bass cabinet maker, the team quickly moved into the research of new technology of bass amplifiers. Nick and engineer/designer Franco Savio were working on their first digital amp in 1999, many years before most others even heard of digital amplifiers.

Our first production amps, designed by Nick and Franco in Torino, Italy, were the UL 502 and UL 902. Released in 2004, they were quite a bit ahead of their time. The UL 902 was an 1800 watt digital amp with a switched mode power supply. But more than power, the UL amps became instant classics due to their studio-grade pre-amps and superb sound.
 
The last few years have seen the expansion of Epifani’s sound to new products in all price ranges.  Epifani’s latest cabinets, the D.I.S.T series. use newly designed cast aluminum frame loudspeakers, intricately machined internal construction and every engineering advance Epifani has gained in over 20 years of bass cabinet research and design.

The secret is our Dual Impedance Speaker Technology—an industry first technology that includes a revolutionary new proprietary neodymium speaker design with a complex crossover network that allows users to select the ideal impedance to optimize the power handling of a single cabinet or multiple cabinet system.

As for amplifiers, the latest is the new Piccolo series. Piccolo features an exclusive Epifani Vintage circuit that adds a warm, tube-like, 1960’s tone to the overall output. A proprietary Class D amp and a switch-mode power supply makes it the lightest, most powerful, fullest sounding amp on the market today.