Do No Harm: solid conductors, biased dielectrics and noise dissipation from Irvine, California, since 1980.

William E. Low, known as Bill, ran an appointment-only hi-fi shop in Santa Monica, California, and in 1978 began making cables for it. The first was a finely stranded Litz loudspeaker cable designed by Dave Gore, based on an idea Martin Colloms had published in Hi-Fi News in 1977. Low registered the AudioQuest trade name in April 1980, by which time he had moved to Pacific Palisades; Joe Harley, later the producer behind the AudioQuest Music label, assembled cable at home in the evenings. The first products were two speaker cables, then two interconnects. Low took them to the 1981 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show and reported dealers in 35 states and 19 countries within a month. He has told the story of the day a four-conductor spiral beat two twisted pairs in his own listening, and of what it taught him: "That's the day that I learned that geometry makes an important difference." Geometry, and then the conductor itself, became the company's subject.

Cables were not the whole business. In 1982 AudioQuest began selling phono cartridges with the AQ-404 moving coil, and Low has said that cartridges were half of the company's sales in 1984 and 1985. Harley joined full time in 1983. The conductor work that defines the company came next: AudioQuest describes itself as the first American high-performance wire company to introduce advanced conductor technology, in 1985; the Linear Crystal conductor followed in 1987, the year Low also began making Toslink optical cables, and the patented HyperLitz construction in 1988. High-performance video cables arrived in 1989. In 1990 Low founded the AudioQuest Music record label, with Harley producing. Low's description of his method from this period is that "most everything I sell was a successful experiment the first time I manufactured it," and his stated rule has stayed the same since: a cable cannot improve the signal it carries and can only do it less harm.

The Dielectric-Bias System, a battery pack that holds a DC voltage across a cable's insulation, was patented and introduced in 2004, and on January 5 of that year Monster Cable sued, alleging that it infringed Monster's own bias-circuit patent. AudioQuest won summary judgment on August 8, 2005, and the Federal Circuit upheld the ruling on December 13, 2006; Low said the company was "proud of the fact that we held our ground against Monster's aggressive tactics." The first AudioQuest HDMI cables came in 2005. In 2008 Low turned down a buyout he has put at about $50 million. The DragonFly, a USB DAC and headphone amplifier the size of a flash drive designed by Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio, was released in June 2012 at $249 and won Stereophile's Computer Audio Component of the Year and Budget Component of the Year; a $150 v1.2 followed in 2014, the NightHawk headphone was a CES 2015 Innovation Award honoree, and the DragonFly Black at $99 and Red at $199 arrived in 2016.

Between 2014 and 2015 Low hired Garth Powell, an engineer from Furman Sound, to lead a power-products project. The Niagara 7000 was shown at CES 2015 and introduced that year at $7,995, with Transient Power Correction for amplifiers, Dielectric-Biased isolation transformers and six banks of Ground-Noise Dissipation. The Niagara 5000 at $3,995 and the Niagara 1000 were reviewed in 2017, the year the Storm Series AC cables, Thunder, Tornado and Hurricane, brought ZERO-Tech, the no-characteristic-impedance construction, to power cords. In 2018 the same idea went into the Mythical Creatures speaker cables, ThunderBird, FireBird and Dragon, each as a ZERO cable and a BASS cable, and Powell published the white paper "Power Demystified." The Niagara 1200 was reviewed in September 2019 at $999.95. That year, around the company's fortieth anniversary, Low told StereoNET that AudioQuest employed 139 people: more than 80 at the headquarters in Irvine, California, 37 at the European headquarters in Roosendaal, the Netherlands, and four in Asia.

The Mythical Creatures interconnects, ThunderBird, FireBird and Dragon, had been reviewed in Europe by April 2022, and in 2023 Alan Sircom in hi-fi+ and Neil Gader in The Absolute Sound reviewed the ThunderBird interconnect and the ThunderBird ZERO. The Pegasus interconnect and the FireBird and Dragon AC cables appeared on the current audioquest.com store in January and February 2024, and the ThunderBird and Dragon BiWire Jumpers and GroundGoody ground leads followed in February and March. On June 21, 2024, Low was the first guest on Stereophile's "Icons of Audio" series, where he restated a position he has held for decades: "There is no 'weak link' in hi-fi." On August 14, 2024, Powell, by then Senior Director of Engineering, published "Killing the Noise," on how the ZERO and BASS speaker cables work together. Then the speaker-cable range began to turn over. Brave Heart, a Level 7 ZERO-Tech cable, was published on July 17, 2025; on October 7 The Absolute Sound gave its inaugural Technology of the Year award to the ThunderBird and Dragon interconnects and the ThunderBird speaker cable; and on October 16 Lone Ranger arrived, succeeding Robin Hood.

In 2026 the turnover was completed. BigFoot BASS was introduced on March 24; the PowerQuest 909 conditioner, at $2,499.95, was shown at AXPONA in April; on October 1 Stereophile's Recommended Components listed 29 AudioQuest products; and on October 2 ThunderBird XTRM, Dragon XTRM, BassZilla and Athena were published, introducing No-Grain Copper and No-Grain Silver conductors. With them, the original ThunderBird, FireBird and Dragon ZERO and BASS speaker cables and the William Tell and Robin Hood Folk Heroes left audioquest.com, while the Mythical Creatures interconnects and the FireBird and Dragon AC cables were unchanged. The DragonFly Copper, again designed by Rankin, was reviewed in October at $250. AudioQuest now sells in about 65 countries from Irvine, with Low described as founder and chief designer and Powell as Senior Director of Engineering, and its stated goal is still "Do No Harm," on the principle that the signal is purest at the source and a cable can only avoid damaging it. Low put it this way in 2024: "You can change anything in an audio system, and, if you do less damage, the sound is better."