A driver maker’s website in Hannover.

CODA Audio is a German maker of professional loudspeaker systems for touring and fixed installation, based in the Expo-Park business district of Hannover. It styles its name in capitals, CODA, and signs off its marketing with the line “Hearing is Believing.”

The company does not give a founding year on any of the pages we checked, but the Internet Archive shows where the name comes from. By November 2001 the codaaudio.com website belonged to BMS Elektronik GmbH, then based in Hannover-Laatzen, and listed products, applications, patents and distributors. In 2002 and 2003 the site kept separate distributor lists for BMS and for Coda, and sold horn drivers alongside loudspeakers. BMS described itself as a maker of “highest quality transducers,” with its own website, while Coda was its range of “professional loudspeaker systems.” By late 2003 BMS had moved to the Expo-Park address that CODA Audio uses today.

The company names its founder in its own news releases. From 2021 onward they call Svetly Alexandrov “CODA Audio founder and Managing Director,” and the legal notice on its website has named Svetlomir Alexandrov as managing director of Coda Audio GmbH since at least 2013, according to an archived copy. In a 2023 release Alexandrov said the French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre was “someone I idolised when I was growing up.” A British venue manager quoted by the company in 2026 mentioned “the back story of its founder being a former musician”; we have not been able to check that independently.

Its own drivers, and a factory in Bulgaria.

CODA’s pitch rests on making its own parts. Its “About” page says the company has “our own manufacturing facility in Europe which produces all of the driver and cabinet components,” and that it makes “drivers, hardware, enclosures, crossovers & other electronics” in-house, with “over 300 employees.” A March 2020 release about working through the COVID-19 pandemic named the country: “Our manufacturing facility in Bulgaria is functioning efficiently,” it said, while sales, marketing and administration staff worked from home. A 2016 version of its website described CNC-cut cabinet parts, a conveyor painting line, CNC-milled flying hardware and in-house electronics for self-powered boxes, with every driver and crossover tested and logged. A 2017 case study also mentions clients flying to “Coda’s factory in Hannover,” so we give the company’s claims as it makes them and note that its copy uses both places.

The product range is built around line arrays with RAY in their names. AiRAY is the large-format touring system, ViRAY and N-RAY are smaller arrays, CiRAY and TiRAY fill other sizes, and CoRAY is a column. Alongside them are the APS and HOPS point sources, the SC sensor-controlled subwoofers, CUE stage monitors and LINUS amplifiers with built-in processing. CODA lists technologies including Wideband Cardioid, its DDP, DDC and RDC drivers, Dynamic Airflow Cooling and the Instafit magnetic coupler for rigging.

Since 2021 the company has pushed into immersive sound. Its SPACE HUB processor, which it says renders up to 128 sources into 128 outputs, was launched at the Tonmeistertagung in Düsseldorf in November 2021 after a trial at the Utopia festival in Marseille. In January 2023 CODA announced a partnership with Jean-Michel Jarre, starting with immersive shows of his album Oxymore at MIDƐM+ in Cannes on an N-RAY system, and then launched SPACE by CODA, a system combining sound, projection and art, at ISE 2023 with Jarre and the French artist Eric Decastro.

Touring PA makers in context.

The makers in this guide share a market — loudspeakers for concerts, clubs and large venues — but not a pattern of ownership.

In the United States, EAW, founded in 1978 by Kenneth Berger and Kenton Forsythe, is headquartered in Franklin, Massachusetts. It was sold to Mackie Designs in 2000 and bought by Italy’s RCF group in 2018, which, EAW says, re-established it as an independently operated company. Danley Sound Labs, which says it was founded in 2005 by Tom Danley and Mike Hedden, is based in Gainesville, Georgia. Clair Global, begun by the brothers Roy and Gene Clair in 1966, is still headquartered in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and privately held, according to English Wikipedia.

In Europe, Turbosound traces its story to Tony Andrews’ festival sound systems of the early 1970s and became Turbosound Ltd in 1978, its website says; English Wikipedia reports that it was bought in 2012 by Music Group, now Music Tribe, Uli Behringer’s holding company in Makati, Metro Manila. Coda Audio is based in Hannover, Germany, and says it makes its drivers and cabinets in its own European factory.

VUE Audiotechnik, launched in San Diego in 2012 by EAW co-founder Ken Berger and Jim Sides, says it was acquired in 2024 by its long-standing Chinese distributor, C-VUE (Shanghai) Audio Technology, and closed its US office at the end of that year. Pioneer Pro Audio, launched by Pioneer in 2013, now belongs to AlphaTheta of Yokohama, a subsidiary of Japan’s Noritsu Koki.

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.

A German company with offices in England and California.

CODA presents itself as an international company run from Hannover. Its contact page lists CODA Audio International and CODA Audio Deutschland GmbH side by side in the Expo-Park, CODA Audio UK in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and CODA Audio USA in Richmond, California. The German sales company was created in 2017 under Ton Groen, who had worked for Meyer Sound and RCF, and the American business was put under Luke Jenks, formerly of Meyer Sound, in 2016, according to CODA’s own announcements. Much of its news is written in British English, which may be why the brand is sometimes taken for a British one; the legal company, CODA Audio GmbH, is registered in Hannover.

We found no record of the company being sold, and no outside investor named on its website; the legal notice names Svetlomir Alexandrov as managing director, as it did in 2013. CODA describes itself as “one of the largest pro-audio companies in Europe,” which we could not check. It sells through distributors country by country, and its case studies run from arena tours and festivals to churches, theatres and clubs. A distributor quoted by the company in 2017 summed up the in-house approach as systems “designed and manufactured in-house,” so users are “not reliant on external elements.”

The company also says it publishes “real technical data” rather than figures that “look good on paper,” and lists its technical aims as low distortion, a coherent wavefront and a low crossover point from highs to lows. Those are its claims; we found no independent test on the pages we checked. Wikipedia has no article on the company in English, German or Bulgarian.

For a design guide, CODA Audio shows how a supplier of parts can become a brand in its own right, keeping one short slogan and one naming system across its range. Compare d&b audiotechnik, another German touring-PA maker, and L-Acoustics, the French line-array pioneer. For this guide we use black, grey and a deep red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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