Electronic music first, broadcasting later.

Lawo began in 1970, when the engineer Peter Lawo set up an engineer’s office for electronic equipment in Rastatt, a town in Baden-Württemberg between Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden, the company says. Its first customers were not broadcasters but composers. English Wikipedia, citing a 1996 publication of the International Society for Contemporary Music, says Peter Lawo built a device called “module 69 B” to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s specifications for the performance of Mantra, and that the success of that production led to the founding, in 1971, of the experimental studio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation at Südwestfunk, the regional broadcaster.

With that studio’s first director, the composer Hans Peter Haller, Lawo developed the Halaphon, whose name joins the first syllables of the two men’s surnames. English Wikipedia’s article on Haller describes it as a “fully electronic sound control device for the movement of a sound source in a given space,” made by Lawo; it was used in the late works of Luigi Nono. The company itself names Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Nono among the composers whose recorded works it contributed to.

The early business was broad. Lawo says its engineers also worked on medical lasers, helicopter crew helmets with radio intercoms and programmable destination displays for buses and trains, alongside vocoders and analogue mixing modules. In the 1980s it built the PTR — short for “Programmierbare Tonregie,” or programmable audio control — a hybrid console with digital control over analogue audio, which could store settings and recall fader moves. English Wikipedia, citing a 1996 paper in the journal Organised Sound, says that recall was used to produce Stockhausen’s Oktophonie at the electronic-music studio of the broadcaster WDR in Cologne.

From the mc series to IP.

The turn to broadcasting came with digital audio. Lawo says its first fully digital mixing console, the mc series, arrived in 1994, and that its success led the company to concentrate solely on broadcast technology. In 1998 it introduced the mc² series of modular digital consoles, which used MADI and ATM networking to move audio between units; the mc² name still heads its console range, in models such as the mc²36 and mc²96.

Sport made the name familiar inside the industry. Lawo says more than 50 of its mc² consoles were used at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, producing about 70 percent of the international feeds, and that it supplied the console for Formula One’s host production that year. English Wikipedia, citing PSN Europe in August 2012, says more than 50 Lawo consoles mixed sound at the London Olympics. In 2015 the company introduced KICK, an automated system for mixing the close-ball sound in football coverage; Lawo says that since 2017 it has been compulsory for audio production of all Bundesliga matches.

Lawo also bet early on carrying audio over standard IP networks. It says it initiated the development of RAVENNA in 2007 as an open media-over-IP technology, introduced by its affiliate ALC NetworX, and joined the AES working group that defined the AES67 networking standard in 2011. In 2015 it founded the Alliance for IP Media Solutions with Grass Valley and Imagine, according to its own timeline. Its range has since moved beyond consoles into IP routing, video processing and control software: V__matrix in 2016; the HOME management platform in 2021, which the company says won a NAB Show Product of the Year award that year; and HOME Apps, processing software that runs on ordinary servers, from 2023.

Lawo also makes smaller broadcast desks, among them ruby, which it describes as a radio desk, and diamond, for radio and TV. And in 2008 it took a majority share in the French digital-console maker Innovason, Radio World reported that May, a move the announcement said ended Innovason’s period in receivership.

Consoles for live sound and broadcast.

The mixing consoles and processors behind concerts, theatres and broadcast studios come from a small number of makers, and most of them now sit inside larger groups.

The biggest of those groups is Audiotonix, formed in 2014 by combining Allen & Heath, Calrec and DiGiCo, according to Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal. It bought Solid State Logic in 2017, and the investment firm Ardian took a majority stake in 2019, the Financial Times reported. In 2024 Audiotonix announced an agreement with the investment firm PAI Partners, with Ardian and Astorg keeping minority stakes. DiGiCo gives its address as Chessington, in Surrey; Calrec’s is a mill in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. Harrison, which presents itself as a Nashville brand, was bought by Solid State Logic, which announced the deal in April 2023; Harrison’s own history gives 2022.

Soundcraft, founded in Britain in 1973 by Phil Dudderidge and Graham Blyth, describes itself as part of Harman’s professional division. Samsung Electronics completed its purchase of Harman in 2017.

Midas and Klark Teknik have shared owners since Klark Teknik, of Kidderminster, bought Midas in 1987. Since December 2009 both have belonged to Music Group, now Music Tribe, the company chaired by Uli Behringer and based in Makati, in the Philippines; Midas says it opened a research centre in Manchester.

Lawo, of Rastatt in Germany, was founded in 1970 by Peter Lawo, according to Wikipedia; its website lists his son Philipp on the supervisory board. We found no outside group owner in the sources we checked.

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 family company with a new chief executive.

Lawo remains in Rastatt and remains privately owned. In 2019 its finance director described it as “an independent, 100% privately owned company,” and it grew as a family business: Peter Lawo’s son Philipp Lawo took over as chief executive in 1999, according to a Lawo release marking the company’s 50th anniversary in 2020. In March 2026 Lawo announced that Jamie Dunn, who joined in 2011 and had been deputy chief executive since 2024, had become chief executive of Lawo AG, while Philipp Lawo moved to the supervisory board and remained the sole executive of the holding company above it — a change the company said more clearly separated management from control. English Wikipedia’s introduction still describes the firm as run by Philipp Lawo, which is now out of date.

On manufacturing, the company’s wording is direct: “Lawo products are manufactured to highest quality standards in Rastatt, Germany.” We give that as its claim; we found no independent report of where individual products are assembled. The group lists subsidiaries in North America and the UK, and its 2020 anniversary ran under the slogan “50 years of engineering the future.” It also says it received an “Emmy Engineering Plaque” in 2013, which we did not check independently. One naming note: the German Wikipedia article titled “Lawo” is about a former village in East Prussia, not the company.

For a design guide, Lawo shows how a maker that began with avant-garde music became part of the plumbing of live television. Compare Calrec, the British broadcast-console maker, and Solid State Logic. For this guide we use navy, graphite and a signal blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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