Biamp Brand Guidelines: From a 1976 Oregon Live-Sound Maker to Tesira and Parlé

A bassist’s amplifier, a non-compete and a new company.

Biamp’s own history begins with a band. Its 50th-anniversary history says the company grew out of Sunn, the amplifier maker started by Norm Sundholm, bassist of the Kingsmen, and his brother Conrad. English Wikipedia dates Sunn to 1965 in Tualatin, Oregon, and tells the same story: after the Portland band’s hit with “Louie, Louie,” Norm Sundholm found his bass amplifier too weak for the concert halls of a national tour, and his brother helped him build a stronger one. When the Hartzell Corporation bought Sunn, Biamp’s history says, Norm Sundholm signed a non-compete agreement that kept him out of amplifiers for a time.

When it ended, he founded Biamp Systems in 1976 with the engineer Richard McLoed, according to the company, to build audio equipment for live performance. A company post marking its fortieth year in 2016 says Biamp has been in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, from the beginning; today its headquarters are in Beaverton. Its early catalogue, as the company lists it, ran from the Keyboard Equalizer of 1976 and the Model 6702 stereo mixing console of 1977 to the MixPack powered mixer and the XA MOSFET amplifiers of 1986.

Ownership changed several times in the early decades. Biamp’s history says Sundholm sold the company to Leupold & Stevens; that a management team including Ralph Lockhart, who led sales and marketing, and Jerry Payette, formerly of Sunn, then bought it back; and that it later passed to the IMC Group and then to the Lomar Corporation, with its leadership kept in place.

From mixing desks to ceiling microphones.

In the late 1980s Biamp turned from live sound to audio installed in buildings, the company says, with the Advantage mic and line mixers and Legend consoles for houses of worship, venues and corporate spaces, and the DJ5600 club mixer in the early 1990s. In the late 1990s it moved into digital signal processing with the Advantage Voicecrafter, designed to deal with echo on teleconference calls, followed by its first video product, the VSX41, the MSP 11 processor and BiampWIN configuration software.

Biamp describes the 2000s as the decade it became known for open-architecture digital signal processing — rack-mounted processors that integrators program, configure and scale to suit each building. The company lists the Audia family, then Nexia, and Vocia for paging and voice evacuation. In the 2010s came Tesira, a networked platform for audio and later video, with TesiraLUX for video distribution and TesiraFORTÉ for conferencing rooms. Biamp says it also opened operations in Brisbane, Australia, an office in Rochester, New York, and a manufacturing facility in Tigard, Oregon.

Under its current owners the range moved into the meeting room itself: Parlé beamtracking ceiling microphones and conferencing bars, Vidi conferencing cameras, the Launch automatic room set-up and a cloud platform, Biamp Workplace. The company says initial design, engineering, manufacturing and testing are managed within its own facilities, and that it greatly increased its US manufacturing capacity after 2017.

The meeting-room trade.

Conference-room and pro AV makers sell a room more than a gadget. Their catalogues and websites tend to show the same scene: a meeting table, a large display on the wall, a slim video bar mounted under the screen, microphones set into the ceiling, and a small touch panel on the table that starts the call, dims the lights and switches the source. The equipment that makes the room work is usually out of sight, in a rack in a cupboard or above the ceiling tiles.

That hidden layer is where much of the industry’s engineering sits: control processors, signal switchers and extenders, amplifiers and digital signal processors that shape the audio of a room. These are boxes with plain faceplates and model numbers rather than consumer-style names, and their brands live on the label, the rack ear and the software screen an installer sees when setting up a system.

Most of these products do not reach buyers off a shelf. They are specified and wired in by systems integrators and installers working for companies, universities, schools and public bodies, and many makers run their own training and certification programmes for those partners. The trade gathers at fairs such as InfoComm in the United States and Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), where new panels, cameras and processors are shown on stands built to look like finished meeting rooms.

For a design guide, the category shows identity working at two scales: a calm, uncluttered room for the people who use it, and a dense, technical system of labels, connectors and part numbers for the people who build it. The makers in this guide are set out with what can be checked about who founded them, who owns them and where their products are made.

Private equity, and a string of acquisitions.

In November 2017 the Dallas private equity firm Highlander Partners bought Biamp from the Lomar Corporation, which kept a minority investment, AV Magazine reported on 4 December 2017. Rashid Skaf, who had led the control-system maker AMX for fifteen years, became president, chief executive and co-chairman, and the previous chief executive, Matt Czyzewski, stayed on to lead technology. Highlander had brought Skaf in as an adviser to find technology companies, and Biamp was the first investment from that search. Highlander still lists Biamp, in Beaverton, in its portfolio.

Highlander’s stated approach was to “buy and build,” and Biamp has bought steadily since. In December 2018 Highlander announced that Biamp had acquired Cambridge Sound Management, a sound-masking company from Waltham, Massachusetts. Biamp’s own list continues with Community Professional Loudspeakers and Apart Audio in 2019, Huddle Room Technology in 2020, Neets, a maker of room controls, in 2021, and Evoko, a maker of meeting-room and desk scheduling systems, in 2023. In October 2025 AV Magazine reported that Biamp had agreed to acquire the assets of ClearOne, including its intellectual property, brands and patents for beamforming microphone arrays, after a refinancing and restructuring at ClearOne earlier that year; Biamp said it took on no obligation to keep selling or supporting ClearOne-branded products.

In 2026 Biamp marked fifty years with an online history and a museum tour on its website, which carries the line “Connecting people through extraordinary audiovisual experiences.” Its range now runs under several names: alongside Biamp it sells Cambridge, Community, Evoko and other brands it has bought, grouped by the rooms they serve, from classrooms and courts to houses of worship.

For a design guide, Biamp shows how a pro-audio name from the live-sound era can be rebuilt into a meeting-room brand through acquisitions while keeping its own name on top. Compare ClearOne, whose assets Biamp bought in 2025, and Shure, another American microphone maker. For this guide we use a graphite, a deep signal red and cool greys with a technical sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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