professional-audio
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Genelec Quit Half Its Business to Build Speakers That Tell the Truth
A flawed two-week prototype became a 340-speaker order. Then the Finnish company walked away from half its business, bet on active monitoring, and turned the room itself into part of the product.
Audio-Technica Beat the CD by Turning One Tiny Audio Skill Into a 64-Year Business
A cartridge maker should have disappeared when CDs arrived. Instead, Audio-Technica treated the format shift as an engineering prompt - and built a durable business around the overlooked hardware between a sound and the person hearing it.
The Loudspeaker Company Betting Big Sound Should Be Small Enough to Disappear
K-ARRAY USA sells a surprisingly practical idea: the best loudspeaker in a beautiful room may be the one nobody notices. Its compact Italian hardware, U.S. integrator network and expanding software stack show how design can become a distribution strategy - provided the acoustics still work.
The Speaker Company That Went Bankrupt - Then Put the Studio Back in the Living Room
M&K Sound helped popularize the powered subwoofer, disappeared into bankruptcy, and returned with the same stubborn proposition: your home theater should tell the truth about the mix. Here is what survived, what it costs, and what builders can borrow.
The Family That Wired the World's Stages - And Then Sold the Headphones
Fritz Sennheiser started a lab in a farmhouse in 1945. Eighty years later his grandsons run the microphone company that quietly powers your favorite show - and made a hard call about the headphones on your head.
HARMAN International
You may know the speaker. You probably do not know the company inside the dashboard. HARMAN has spent seven decades turning sound science into a sprawling business across homes, stages and more than 50 million vehicles.
sensiBel
sensiBel is a Norwegian semiconductor company that makes optical MEMS microphones - tiny chip-scale devices that use a laser and photodetector to sense a diaphragm's motion instead of the electrical (capacitive) method used in almost every microphone for the past century. Its flagship SBM100B is billed as the world's first production optical MEMS microphone, delivering studio-grade specs (80 dBA SNR, 146 dB acoustic overload point, 132 dB dynamic range) in a package small enough for earbuds, laptops and microphone arrays. Spun out of Norwegian research institute SINTEF in 2017, sensiBel sells to audio, consumer-electronics and pro-audio manufacturers and counts Sennheiser among its investors.