A speaker its founder could not buy.

Audiovector was founded in Copenhagen in 1979 by Ole Klifoth, who had worked in other parts of the hi-fi trade. The company tells its origin in one line, which it has repeated for at least a decade: Klifoth “could not find the speaker of my dreams, so I decided to build it myself.” That quotation appears both on its website and in its chapter of Danish Loudspeakers, a 2015 book marking a hundred years since the Danish engineer Peter Laurits Jensen co-invented the loudspeaker, with a foreword by the director of the Danish Sound Innovation Network. Audiovector hosts the book on its site, so we treat its chapter as the company’s own account.

That chapter credits Audiovector’s start to the Trapez, launched in 1979 as the brainchild of Klifoth as chief engineer. It used three drivers — modified units from the Danish makers Scan-Speak and Dynaudio — on a baffle sloping backwards, so that the drivers’ acoustic centres lined up in time when fed by a gentle 6 dB-per-octave crossover. The idea, the company says, was a speaker with a linear frequency response and a linear phase response, built around what it calls “linear dynamics, linear phase and low compression.” The cabinet was styled by the Danish industrial designer Lars Mathiesen, and the book says the Trapez sold more than 25,000 pairs over the next ten years. A 2024 review in hi-fi+ tells it slightly differently: there, the very first Audiovector was a giant eight-driver, six-way trapezoid design, with the more manageable three-way Trapez following soon after. We give both versions.

Mathiesen and Klifoth went on to design the slim, one-metre Audiovector 3, and later the teardrop-shaped S 6, according to the company’s history. The firm stayed small: the 2015 book listed nine employees and main markets in Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Germany and Japan.

The upgrade idea.

What sets Audiovector apart in print is not a shape but a promise. Its Individual Upgrade Concept, or IUC, lets owners return certain speakers to the company and have them rebuilt with better parts, moving up its own ladder of versions rather than buying new boxes. The company describes it as an option “to upgrade your speakers whenever you want,” which it says makes its speakers “future proof.” Its own histories disagree on the start date. The 2015 book says the concept was invented in 1996, with the modular M-series; in a 2021 interview with hi-fi+, Mads Klifoth said it “started in 1982” and was his father’s idea. We report both.

The ladder is easiest to see in a single model. When the Danish magazine Lyd & Billede visited in 2017 it listed the SR3 as Super, Signature, Avantgarde and Avantgarde Arreté, each one a step up, alongside a QR3 range that could not be upgraded. The magazine priced the flagship, the R 11 Arreté, at about 1.35 million Danish kroner a pair. The company says the R 11 was started in 2007 by Ole Klifoth and the designer Jacob Tryde as an in-house reference against which every new model would be judged.

Around the upgrade idea sits a list of acronyms that the company treats as its signature: LCC for low compression, SEC for an open-backed tweeter arrangement it dates to 1996, NES, a cryogenic wire treatment called NCS, and a grounding system sold as Freedom. Stereophile, reviewing the R 8 Arreté, listed the same set, and its Recommended Components list for 2023 gave the speaker’s price as $77,500 a pair. In 2024, for its 45th anniversary, Audiovector reissued its first hit as the Trapeze Reimagined, a three-way floorstander that hi-fi+ priced at £15,500 a pair and What Hi-Fi? reviewed that September.

Danish hi-fi and the upgrade.

Denmark has been making loudspeakers and audio equipment for a century. Bang & Olufsen was founded in Struer in 1925 by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, and Ortofon began in Copenhagen in 1918 as the Electrical Phono Film Company, according to English Wikipedia.

Much of the industry grew around drive units. The loudspeaker factory that became Vifa was set up in Videbæk in 1933, initially supplying Bang & Olufsen, English Wikipedia says; Vifa took over the driver maker Scan-Speak in the late 1980s and its Danish rival Peerless in 2000, and in 2005 the combined business passed to Tymphany, which sold Scan-Speak to its Danish management in 2009.

Complete-speaker brands followed: Jamo in 1968, by its own account; Dynaudio in Skanderborg in 1977; and DALI, founded by Peter Lyngdorf in 1983 and based in Nørager, according to English Wikipedia. Several have since passed to foreign owners — Dynaudio to China’s Goertek in 2014, and Jamo to Klipsch in 2005.

The makers in this guide are spread mostly across Jutland, with one on Zealand: Jamo, founded at Glyngøre on the Limfjord; Scan-Speak in Herning; Raidho at Pandrup, care of Dantax; Børresen in Aalborg; Audiovector at Skovlunde, outside Copenhagen; Densen, founded in Esbjerg and moved to North Jutland after a 2021 change of ownership; and Lyngdorf in Skive — according to their own websites and Danish trade press.

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.

Still a family firm.

Audiovector has not been sold. Its website calls it “a family owned company based in Copenhagen,” and the ownership has passed from father to son. Mads Klifoth has run the business commercially since 2015, the company says; in 2021 he told hi-fi+ he had become managing director and majority shareholder “five years ago,” so the handover is dated 2015 or 2016 depending on the source. He came from real estate. Ole Klifoth stayed on as head of research and development, and the company’s page describes him, at 72, as still an active member of the team.

The legal name on the company’s contact page is F3 / Audiovector ApS, at Mileparken in Skovlunde, a suburb west of central Copenhagen. Its size has roughly doubled in the period we can document: nine employees in the 2015 book, and “a total of 17 dedicated staff based in-house” in Mads Klifoth’s 2021 interview, where he said a speaker can take from two hours to ten days to build.

Where the speakers are made needs care. The company says every loudspeaker is “designed, developed and produced in-house,” that one person builds each speaker through the whole process, and that “all Audiovector drivers are designed in-house and hand built.” The independent record is more nuanced. The 2015 book says the first Trapez used modified Scan-Speak and Dynaudio drivers, and that Audiovector developed a three-layer cone with Scan-Speak. When Lyd & Billede visited in 2017, Ole Klifoth told the magazine that Audiovector used Scan-Speak drive units, though none was an off-the-shelf part, and that the company did not make its own components but bought them from Danish suppliers it had worked with for decades. The magazine added that the paint was applied by the same Danish finishers used for Lamborghini and Porsche cars. We give the company’s claim as its claim, and the 2017 account as the most detailed independent description we found.

For a design guide, Audiovector shows how a small maker can build a brand on the idea that its products should be kept rather than replaced. Compare Scan-Speak, the Danish driver maker whose units Audiovector has long used, and Dynaudio, whose drivers were in the first Trapez. For this guide we use graphite, walnut, stone and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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