One designer, sold direct.

Tekton Design is the loudspeaker company of Eric Alexander, and it trades as TektonDesign, LLC from Orem, Utah, a city in Utah County. The company’s website does not give a founding date, but the dates line up around 2005: Alexander told Positive Feedback in 2012 that he had worked on Tekton full-time “since 2005,” and in a January 2019 letter on the company site he thanked customers for “the last 14 years.” 6moons, reviewing a Tekton speaker in March 2019, put the figure at “over 15 years,” so we treat the year as approximate. In a 2021 note Alexander wrote that the business had started “as a one-man operation.”

Alexander came to Tekton with a long résumé. He told Positive Feedback he had held audio jobs since 1986 — at Kimber Kable, Diaural, Edge Audio (which became Aperion Audio) and SoundTube Entertainment, which he called the largest speaker manufacturer in Utah — and that he had more than 50 commercially available loudspeaker models to his credit. He also said he built his first pair of speakers at 14, for a neighbourhood dance party, and that he still plays percussion. Those are his own accounts, given in an interview, rather than independently checked facts.

According to the same interview, Tekton started out selling full-range-driver designs before moving to vented boxes built around professional drivers. The Lore, reviewed in Positive Feedback’s March/April 2012 issue, paired an Eminence 10-inch driver — specified as a bass-guitar unit — with an Audax tweeter, and was efficient enough for the reviewer to drive it with a 15-watt valve amplifier.

Many tweeters, one patent.

Tekton’s signature is the cluster of tweeters. The Enzo, which CNET’s Steve Guttenberg reviewed in May 2013, was a 40-inch tower with three ring-radiator tweeters and two 8-inch woofers, rated at 98dB sensitivity; Guttenberg wrote that Alexander “personally assembles and tests every pair of Enzos in his factory in Utah.” The Impact Monitor went further. Reviewing it for Stereophile in July 2018, Herb Reichert described a $2,000-a-pair, three-way stand-mounter with two 6.5-inch mid/bass drivers and seven 1-inch dome tweeters, which Alexander calls a “polycell array”; Alexander told the magazine the drive units were produced by SB Acoustics. Reichert admitted he had expected the tweeters to be “a gimmick,” and ended up calling the speaker “Highly recommended.”

John Atkinson’s measurements for the same review found a sensitivity of 87.5dB, well below the 94dB specification, but a “superbly even on-axis response” and horizontal dispersion that was “commendably even”; the array, he wrote, “works well to control the speaker’s treble dispersion.” Tekton later said the Impact Monitor had recorded the best averaged horizontal response Stereophile had measured for a stand-mounted speaker; that is the company’s summary, not a line we found in the review.

The engineering behind the designs is patented. Google Patents lists US 9,247,339, “Loudspeaker design,” granted in January 2016 with Eric Jay Alexander as inventor, describing speakers that reproduce sound more accurately “through the use of low-mass transducers.” Alexander calls it a low-mass loudspeaker algorithm. Today’s range runs from monitors and the Double Impact towers to the Moab, the Encore and the flagship Ulfberht, plus subwoofers and horn-loaded Wattmeister models.

Tekton shows its speakers in person at hi-fi fairs. At the 2019 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, Alexander wrote, it demonstrated the Moab — a design he described as using 15 tweeters — with Parasound electronics, and Stereophile was among the publications that covered the room. Earlier, the Pendragon, a $2,499-a-pair tower praised in a 2012 review by Andrew Robinson, had drawn a following of its own; 6moons wrote in 2019 that it picked up the nickname “Wilson Audio killer” in the United States.

American loudspeakers, made in America.

The seven loudspeaker makers in this guide are small American companies, most of them built around a single designer. The oldest is Legacy Audio, which Bill Dudleston started in 1983 in Springfield, Illinois, where it remains. It sells through authorized dealers and online, and in 2025 it introduced Jay McArdle as its new owner and chief executive.

Two are in Utah. Tekton Design, run by Eric Alexander, gives its address as Orem and calls its business model “strictly direct-to-consumer.” Spatial Audio Lab, founded by Clayton Shaw, also sells direct, saying dealers “often want a double digit mark-up rate”; the company says Shaw sold its assets to Sam and David Whitt in 2023.

In the Midwest, Salk Sound, Jim Salk’s company, built speakers to order in Pontiac, Michigan, by its own account, and sold them direct. On 15 September 2023 it said it had stopped taking orders and sold its woodworking equipment.

On the coasts, Stereophile places Jeff Joseph’s Joseph Audio on Long Island, New York, and the company’s website sends buyers to dealers. Daedalus Audio, which Lou Hinkley founded in 1992, works from Ferndale, Washington; it says its speakers are sold only direct in the US, with dealers in Australia and Singapore.

The South has Volti Audio. Greg Roberts, who started out rebuilding Klipschorns in Maine, now builds horn loudspeakers in Baxter, Tennessee, selling almost entirely direct.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Factory-direct by design.

Tekton sells only direct. Its FAQ says the business model is “strictly direct-to-consumer,” that every product is made to order with a lead time of four to six weeks, and that buyers get a 60-day home trial and a five-year parts warranty. The website describes the speakers as “made in the USA,” and an archived version of it from 2009 already said they were “proudly handcrafted” in the U.S.A.; Stereophile lists the manufacturer as Tekton Design LLC of Orem. Drive units come from specialist suppliers — Eminence and SB Acoustics among those named in reviews — and Tekton does not say where each part is made.

In 2019 Alexander announced plans for a cost-no-object line priced from $35,000 to over $100,000, and a recording-and-playback research effort he called Project IRL, short for “in real life.” Both are company announcements. Terms have also shifted over time: when Stereophile reviewed the Impact Monitor in 2018, its specification listed a 30-day home trial, with black as the standard finish and red or white at $100 a pair extra.

One naming trap matters for designers. Tekton is also an Adobe Originals typeface, designed by David Siegel and released in 1989, based on the hand lettering of the architect Francis D.K. Ching; Adobe notes that tekton is the Greek word for builder. It has nothing to do with the Utah speaker maker.

For a design guide, Tekton Design shows how a one-designer, factory-direct brand can turn an engineering idea — a swarm of tweeters — into its most recognisable visual signature. Compare Zu Audio and Klipsch. For this guide we use flame orange and gloss black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tekton Design’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.