Spreading the Word on Canadian Audio
Maybe it's my inherent Canadian
diffidence, but I always find it a bit of a jolt to bump into products in foreign
countries that were made in my home and native land. The first time I went to Europe, when
I was still a teenager, I stepped off the ship in France to be confronted with a field
full of Toronto-built Massey-Ferguson tractors.
I get the same feeling when I walk into an audio store in
another country, and find the shelves loaded with Canadian speakers. They have become
respected in international markets, but it's taken them some time to make a real impact.
Howard Heiber, head of Toronto's Audio Products International, says, "It took us
fifteen years to become an overnight success!"
API is definitely one of the leaders, marketing its Energy,
Mirage, and Athena Technologies brands in more that 60 countries. It claims to be among
the ten largest speaker-manufacturing companies in the world.
Today's API is, in fact, the successor to several different
concerns. The earliest was Global Sound Systems which Heiber and his partners bought in
1972. Heiber had been involved in electronics since he was a kid; his father had worked
for a pro-audio distributor, and Howard began working there after school. Buying a speaker
company was a natural.
Global -- a name the company's manufacturing division
continued to use until about six years ago -- made speakers for other companies. Speaker
firms generally design and market their products, but few actually build them themselves.
Instead, they turn them over to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) outfits like Global,
and that is still a big part of API's business today.
The company's first brand of its own was called Paisley
Research. It actually started out as a normal OEM job; the company that contracted with
Global asked engineer Ian Paisley to design the speakers, and it adopted his name as well.
Ultimately, they got out of the speaker business, and Global took on the Paisley line. Ian
Paisley himself, who is still with the company, designed the Mirage line.
By 1982, the company was manufacturing and distributing not
only the Paisley speakers, but another brand called dB Plus and a package line called
Audio Pulse.
One of Global's customers was the original Audio Products
International, which had been started in the mid 1970s by George Baker, one of Canadian
audio's more flamboyant characters. API's brands were Sound Dynamics and Energy. The
latter was built around one of the landmark speakers of early Canadian audio, the Energy
22, which many people at the time considered among the finest speakers on the market,
regardless of origin.
Early in 1984, Global and API were merged, and the latter
name began to be the umbrella under which the company's own brands, which now numbered
five, were marketed.
Another customer was a company that had the Canadian
distribution rights to a British speaker line called Tangent. Eventually, the speakers
were made here, and when the British parent failed, the Canadian outfit renamed the line
Mirage. When the distributor's investors decided to cash out, Heiber picked up the line.
Over the next few years, the company's roster swelled to
nine brands, but in 1989 they decided to concentrate on just three: Energy, Mirage, and
Sound Dynamics. Several years ago, the last was replaced by Athena Technologies,
originally an innovative modular speaker line that was intended to be part of the Sound
Dynamics line. It has instead become its own brand.
The company started exporting in a small way to the U.S.
about 25 years ago, but it wasn't until the recession of the early 1990s that API made a
concentrated effort to sign-up foreign dealers, which they did with notable success. Now,
according to Howard Heiber, only about 20 percent of their sales are in Canada; the United
States accounts for about 55 percent, and the rest are spread around the world. One of the
few places where their success has been limited is Japan, which Heiber calls a
"difficult" market.
It's been no secret to audio observers in this country that
our audio manufacturers -- speaker companies especially -- make products that are a match
for any in the world. Increasingly, companies like API and its competitors Paradigm and
PSB, are taking that message to the world.
Or maybe only Canadians care where those speakers come
from. For everybody else, they're just first-rate hi-fi components.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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