In response to a ''boom'' in vinyl record sales, Mr Brown, the principal of Dunedin-based company Design Build Listen Ltd, launched The Wand unipivot tonearm in 2011.
The arm was important to hi-fi enthusiasts as music was stored in microscopic ripples in the playing grooves of vinyl records and any movement, even at the micron level, made a difference to the reproduced sound, he said.
He recently travelled to Europe and visited turntable makers and was in discussions with some about selling them his tonearms.
A product designer by trade, Mr Brown has worked for Fisher and Paykel ''on and off'' for many years. He has also had a longstanding passion for a diversity of music styles.
He designed a turntable in the 1980s ''when they were fading out a bit'' and always maintained the interest. The boom in vinyl seemed an appropriate time to have another look at it.
While lots of people were launching whole turntables, very few were focusing on the tonearm - the part that carried the needle. The work was ''quite specialised and a bit geeky'' but it did make a difference to the sound and he believed his design represented a step-change in tonearm design.
The popularity of vinyl could be put down to a number of factors. For some people, who grew up with DJs and nightclubs, it was ''just simply cool''.
Mr Brown's generation was told, in the 1980s, that compact discs and digital media were much superior, with perfect sound. Fast forward more than 25 years and digital media was still evolving, he said.
A lot of people now felt more confident saying that ''some magic'' was missing from digitally delivered music, and there were valid technical reasons for that, he said.
He likened listening to vinyl to the slow food movement. It was ''slow music'' - sitting down and listening to one side of a record was all part of the experience.
Mr Brown launched the original wand at the end of 2011 and it was immediately listed as a finalist in the Best Design Awards, an initiative of the Designers Institute of New Zealand.
It has won plaudits in the hi-fi enthusiast media around the world. Last year, UK magazine HiFi Choice gave it five stars out of five, and shortlisted it in its annual awards for the most significant products of the year, while another five-star ranking was awarded by UK magazine HiFi World.
Mr Brown now produces the tonearm in two sizes and launched a retail version several months ago.
While it was still in the early stage, there was ''a bit of an opportunity'' and there was also an opportunity in terms of materials, he said.
New Zealand had a well-developed carbon fibre industry and his tonearm was much stronger than most others on the market, he said.
It was always going to be a niche business. Even though vinyl was booming, ''it's still never going to be large numbers''.
But it was the sort of niche market that could be ''quite a nice business'' and it could be done from New Zealand.
Mr Brown said he needed to ''get out and see people around the world a bit more'' and go to shows to make it more visible. He will attend a trade show in Melbourne in October.
