Audioengine story

Audioengine designs and constructs hand-built speakers at factory-direct prices. All Audioengine products are based on custom designs with very few off-the-shelf parts. After years of building professional powered studio monitor speakers, the Audioengine team has taken their experience and created unique powered consumer speakers for your home and office which are specifically tuned for digital audio. Great sound, simple designs, high-quality materials, and truly useful features are what Audioengine is all about.

Developing the Audioengine 5

The Audioengine team sits in a listening room hour after hour critically listening to all types of music from Bach to Van Halen. They settle in on a Bob Marley song and Brady gets another big grin on his face. It’s early fall of 2005 and they’ve just finished fine-tuning their first speaker system under the Audioengine name. Dave says the tuning is the hardest part, but admits that finishing up the cosmetic details before production will be the big challenge over the next few weeks.

In 2002, after a total of 36 years working in the audio industry for companies such as Harman/Kardon, Gibson Guitar, Alesis Studio Electronics, and Apple Computer, the founding team (Brady, Dave, and Lianne) finally decided to launch their own audio company. Their goal was to design and build high quality studio monitor speakers at affordable prices for the pro-audio market, which is what they’ve been successfully doing for the past 3 years until something interesting happened, as Dave explains:

“When you design studio monitor speakers you tend to spend a crazy amount of time in sound rooms listening for how well the speakers reproduce the original recording,” Dave says, in his Mississippi drawl. “During one of our marathon speaker tuning sessions for a new monitor design, one of us mentioned that we ought to build up a pair for home. They had such a wonderful sound and even though they were studio monitors we agreed they would likely rival Brady’s home stereo speakers.” And after some circuit mods and tuning tweaks it turns out they were right. “These little powered speakers we modified just beat the heck out of my high-end floorstanding speakers. They were extremely sweet-sounding with big bass at low levels and just kicked some serious butt when cranked up,” says Brady.

In another listening room session they had another minor but interesting discovery. They had just recently started using iPods and a wireless AirPort Express to play test music instead of CD players. They generally used lossless recordings but also found that MP3 and AAC files encoded at decent bit rates sounded great. “You know, we could design some high quality powered speakers for people who just want to listen to their portable music at home,” says Lianne. “We have all this technology for true sound reproduction and efficient built-in amps so people don’t need a bunch of stereo components with wires everywhere. These could replace an entire audio system and work perfectly for digital audio players.”

And so it went for the next few weeks. “They’d be great for games,” realizes Dave. “Just check out that bass! And you know, I wouldn’t mind hooking my new flat panel TV to these. The sound would be so much better than the built-in speakers. And we should include a set of cables and adapters so folks don’t have to run all over town looking for something to connect their audio players and other gear to our speakers”.

USB power for charging surfaced as an important addition, which Audioengine has since patented for powered speakers under the “ComboPort” name. “We toyed with doing our own iPod dock just like all the other iMonkeys have done,” admits Brady, “but it just didn’t make sense as the Apple dock is about as good as it gets. And why waste resources trying to redesign something that already exists and will be obsolete in 3 months anyway?” So after a few intense beerstorming sessions, they realized that a USB charging port as well as a rear panel AC outlet for an Apple AirPort Express or Slim Devices Squeezebox would be simple but useful features. “We have this power supply already in the speaker to run the amp,” explains Dave, “so adding a USB connector for people to charge their iPods, phones, and other portables was the next logical step.”

So after many months of development, materials experiments, component improvements, and tuning trial and error, that’s pretty much how the first Audioengine speakers came to be. And they turned out to be everything they wanted and more!