Two laser engineers and a woodworker in a garage.

Infinity Systems was founded in 1968 in the Los Angeles area by Arnie Nudell, John Ulrick and Cary Christie, and on this point the sources agree. In a 2012 Stereophile interview with David Lander, Nudell — a physicist who had studied at UC Berkeley and UCLA — said he met Ulrick, an electronics engineer, in a laser range-finder group at Litton Industries, which also made inertial navigation systems that relied on servo feedback. The two decided to put that feedback around a bass speaker, and worked on it after hours for at least two and a half years.

The result was the Servo-Statik: a servo-controlled woofer with its own amplifier, combined with electrostatic midrange and treble panels developed with RTR Industries, which had bought the Janszen electrostatic patent, Nudell said. Christie, whom Nudell described as “an insurance guy, but an excellent woodworker,” built the cabinets by hand in Brazilian rosewood, and the three assembled the speakers in the evenings in Nudell’s garage in Woodland Hills. A local shop, Woodland Stereo, sold them at about $2,000 a pair, a price Nudell compared with that of a Volkswagen Beetle. Stereophile’s founder, J. Gordon Holt, called the Servo-Statik I “appallingly expensive” in his review, and said he would have bought the sample had he had the money, Lander recalled.

Money came from Black and Strong, a large Los Angeles electronics representative that wanted to move into manufacturing. Nudell and Ulrick left Litton, hired Christie full time and took a small building in Chatsworth. The next product, the 2000A, combined an array of electrostatic tweeters with a transmission-line bass, and a rave review in Stereo Review helped launch the company, Nudell said.

EMIT, the IRS and the Black Widow.

Infinity’s reputation was built on unusual drivers. The best known is the EMIT, short for electromagnetic induction tweeter, a flat, ribbon-like driver; English Wikipedia describes the EMIT tweeters and EMIM midranges introduced in the late 1970s as using samarium-cobalt magnets, which allowed a very light diaphragm. Nudell told Stereophile he first read about the magnets in a German medical magazine, where they were used in implants for drooping eyelids, then flew to Japan to find the people who made them.

The flagship was the IRS, the Infinity Reference Standard, which Stereophile dated to 1978. It stood in four columns about 7.5 feet tall, combining line sources of EMIT tweeters and EMIM midranges with servo-driven woofers, and was designed as a dipole so that the room’s floor, ceiling and side walls would contribute less, Nudell said. Later versions followed, which we have not dated one by one.

The company also sold much cheaper speakers using the same ideas. According to Nudell, Stereo Review surveys ranked Infinity the largest US speaker company for two years, and it sold a $200-a-pair model with the same tweeter as the IRS. It made the Black Widow, a low-mass graphite tonearm, which Nudell said made Infinity the world’s biggest tonearm maker, ahead of SME — a claim we have not checked — and, he said, an early class-D switching amplifier and the first FET preamplifier. English Wikipedia adds polypropylene cones and neodymium magnets to its list of materials, and describes the later SM, or Studio Monitor, series as aimed at a wider market.

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.

From EAD to Harman to Samsung.

Infinity did not stay independent for long. By the mid-1970s, Nudell told Stereophile, Black and Strong wanted to find a buyer, and Eastern Air Devices — later called Electro Audio Dynamics, or EAD — bought its stake along with the founders’ shares, for a sum tied to future earnings. EAD also owned KLH, and Nudell spent a year and a half to two years running both companies. In the early 1980s EAD sold Infinity to Harman International; English Wikipedia gives 1983, and Nudell recalled it as “1983 or ’84.” He stayed on as president and head of product development for about five years, refusing to move Infinity into Harman’s Northridge operation, then left. Ulrick had gone around 1981 or 1982, Nudell said. Nudell later founded Genesis Technologies, a high-end loudspeaker company, in Seattle in 1991, according to Genesis’s own history as cited by English Wikipedia.

Infinity has remained a Harman brand, and since 10 March 2017, when Samsung Electronics completed its $8 billion purchase of Harman, it has belonged to Samsung; English Wikipedia lists Harman’s headquarters as Stamford, Connecticut. Wikipedia describes the brand’s products as home and car speakers, amplifiers and headphones, and says Infinity systems have been offered in Hyundai and Kia cars, a statement it marks as needing a citation. The old address, infinityspeakers.com, now redirects to an online shop. We found no statement of where today’s products are made. In 2012, looking back, Nudell told Stereophile that Infinity had become “a commodity.”

The name has a trap. The Infinity Group that bought the Altec Lansing name at auction in 2012, and the AL Infinity company named on Altec’s website, are separate businesses with no link to Infinity Systems in any source we checked.

For a design guide, Infinity shows a brand that began with an expensive, technically ambitious speaker and then carried its ideas down to everyday prices. Compare Magnepan, another American maker of flat, planar-magnetic speakers, and JBL, its sister brand at Harman. For this guide we use deep indigo, rosewood and ribbon silver with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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