A cinema service company that promised not to make speakers.

Altec Lansing’s website says “since 1927” and its footer promises “100 years of moving sound forward,” but the company is younger than the slogan. The 1927 date points to The Jazz Singer and to the Western Electric engineers who developed sound for motion pictures, whom English Wikipedia credits as the people who later formed Altec. The business came later. Western Electric, part of AT&T, ran a division called Electrical Research Products, Inc., or ERPI, to install and service theatre sound systems. In 1937, English Wikipedia says, citing Motion Picture Herald, a group of ERPI executives — among them George Carrington Sr. and Alvis A. Ward — took over the service business with money from Wall Street investors and reincorporated it as Altec Service Company, the name standing for “all technical.” The same report says the executives promised they would never make or sell audio equipment.

That promise did not last. In 1941 Altec bought the bankrupt Lansing Manufacturing Company, the loudspeaker business of the engineer James B. Lansing, and joined the two names as the Altec Lansing Corporation. English Wikipedia dates the new company to 1 May 1941, and the trade paper TWICE also gave 1941 as the founding year in 2012. Wikipedia names the first Altec Lansing power amplifier as the Model 142B, made the same year. Lansing himself stayed only until 1946, when he left to start the James B. Lansing company — today’s JBL — which went on to compete with his old employer.

So there are three honest answers to the question of when Altec was founded: 1927 for the technical lineage the brand claims, 1937 for the Altec company itself, and 1941 for the Altec Lansing name. English Wikipedia gives all three in different places — 1927 in its summary, 1937 in its history and 1936 in its categories — so we set them out rather than pick one.

The 604 and the Voice of the Theatre.

Altec’s early products came out of the cinema. English Wikipedia describes horn-loaded loudspeaker systems sold on their efficiency and on their ability to fill large theatres from the modest amplifier power of the time, and the 604 series of coaxial drivers, which mounted a compression driver behind the woofer’s magnet and fired it through a multicellular horn in the centre of the cone. Wikipedia, citing Billboard in 1980, names the 604 “Duplex” among the studio monitors used from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Its best-known line was the Voice of the Theatre. English Wikipedia traces it to a project at MGM approved by the studio’s sound chief, Douglas Shearer, and led by John Hilliard, with Lansing’s company recruited to it; the result was called the Shearer horn, and the Voice of the Theatre refined it. The original series included the large A-1, A-2, A-4 and A-5 for cinemas, with the A-7 and A-8 for smaller rooms. The A-7 paired a sectoral metal horn, divided into cells to control dispersion, with a wooden bass cabinet. In 2004 the A-7 was inducted into the TECnology Hall of Fame, which honours “products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology,” according to the TEC Awards listing.

The speakers also left the cinema. At Woodstock in 1969 the sound engineer Bill Hanley built a system using Altec high-frequency drivers and horns with JBL bass drivers, according to Mike Evans and Paul Kingsbury’s 2009 book on the festival. English Wikipedia says Voice of the Theatre systems were used in halls and at rock concerts from the 1960s to the 1990s, and that some professional Altec products stayed in service into the 1990s. In 2004 the consumer company reissued the A7 and several older models, Wikipedia says, though very few were made.

American loudspeakers.

The seven names here are loudspeaker brands sold in America. The oldest is Altec Lansing, formed on 1 May 1941, English Wikipedia says, when the theatre-sound firm Altec Service Company bought the nearly bankrupt Lansing Manufacturing Company. After many owners, the name now appears on Bluetooth speakers and headphones; its website does not say who owns it.

Infinity Systems was founded in Los Angeles in 1968 by Arnie Nudell, John Ulrick and Cary Christie and has belonged to Harman since 1983, according to English Wikipedia; Harman now belongs to Samsung. Snell Acoustics began in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1976, moved to Haverhill and then Peabody, and ceased manufacturing in May 2010, its website said. Dunlavy Audio Labs, the physicist John Dunlavy’s company in Colorado Springs, was listed by Stereophile in 2008 as no longer in existence.

Two are small current makers. Fritz Speakers is the Southern California workshop of John “Fritz” Heiler, who has built speakers since 1973, trade press reports. Philharmonic Audio, which says it now assembles its speakers in Vienna, Virginia, was launched by the crossover designer Dennis Murphy in 2012, by its own account, and relaunched in 2020 with Kenneth Lin, who the company says oversees production.

PureAudioProject is the exception: it sells in the United States but is not an American company. Its 2025 terms name PureAudioProject LTD of Ramat Gan, Israel, with an operating company in Paredes, Portugal; in 2018 Enjoy the Music described a US arm in Iowa City.

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.

Ling, Gulton, Sparkomatic, Plantronics, Prophet, Infinity.

The ownership story after that is long, and the sources disagree on dates. English Wikipedia says the financier James Ling bought the company from George Carrington Sr. in 1958 and made it part of the group that became LTV; TWICE wrote in 2012 that LTV took majority control in 1962. Spun off with heavy debts, Altec went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1984 Gulton Industries bought its sound-products business — TWICE says Gulton closed the home and car lines to concentrate on professional audio — and the cinema service arm was sold to its managers. Eleven months later Mark IV bought Gulton, including Electro-Voice. In 1986 the car-audio company Sparkomatic, of Milford, Pennsylvania, licensed the name for consumer electronics; it renamed itself Altec Lansing Technologies in 1992 and in May 2000 bought the worldwide rights, professional audio included, from Telex Communications, Mark IV’s successor, TWICE reported. In 2008 the company swapped its “whirlpool” logo for an abstraction of a multicellular horn, CNET reported.

Plantronics agreed to buy Altec Lansing in July 2005 for about $166 million, English Wikipedia says; in 2009 it sold the business to the private-equity firm Prophet Equity — PE Hub reported about $18 million — which moved it to San Diego in 2011. In October 2012 Infinity Lifestyle Brands, part of Ike Franco’s Infinity Group, bought the worldwide rights to the brand at auction for $17.5 million, TWICE reported, adding that most of Altec’s other intellectual property went at a separate auction. The plan was to license the name to other companies, which would follow Infinity’s marketing guidelines, starting with docking speakers, headphones and computer speakers. Despite the name, that Infinity is a different company from the Infinity loudspeaker maker.

Today alteclansing.com sells Bluetooth speakers — the Hydra, RockBox, Shockwave and “Everythingproof” ranges — and headphones, including models for children, and its privacy policy names AL Infinity, LLC. Sakar International, a consumer-products company in Edison, New Jersey, which says it licenses more than forty brands, features an Altec Lansing speaker on its home page, and English Wikipedia lists Sakar as the owner; we found no dated source setting out that arrangement, and the website does not say where the products are made. The name now belongs to a consumer brand with a professional past rather than to the cinema company that made it famous.

For a design guide, Altec Lansing shows how a heritage name can be licensed onto very different products while its history stays the selling point. Compare JBL, founded by the engineer who left Altec in 1946, and Klipsch, another American horn-speaker maker. For this guide we use theatre teal, horn black and projection ivory with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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