A radio shop, a question and a patent.

Manger Audio is named after its inventor. Josef Wilhelm Manger — usually written Josef W. Manger — was born in 1929 in Arnstein, in Lower Franconia, German Wikipedia says. After the Second World War and three years in Australia he took over his parents’ electrical shop in Arnstein, which later sold radios and televisions; in the early 1960s he added imported guitars and amplifiers, and he taught himself the basics of loudspeaker technology. The company dates the family business to 1929, to Daniela Manger’s grandparents.

Selling sound systems to bands, the company says, he noticed that loudspeakers which measured alike in frequency response sounded different, and began measuring how they behaved in time — their step responses. German Wikipedia dates the start of his loudspeaker research, and his first patent, for a voice coil, to 1968. A second patent, for a membrane, followed in 1972, according to the company’s timeline, and in 1974 he presented the transducer at the 47th Audio Engineering Society convention in Copenhagen; the German magazine Funkschau reported on it the same year.

The idea was a flat, flexible diaphragm working with bending waves, rather than a stiff cone moving like a piston. German Wikipedia says the theoretical proof was supplied at the Technical University of Berlin in 1978; the company names the acoustician Professor Manfred Heckl, author of a standard work on structure-borne sound. The trademarks Manger-Schallwandler and Manger-Schallsystem were filed in Germany that year, the company says. In 1982 Manger received the Rudolf Diesel Medal, an award for inventors, which the company says was the silver medal of the German Institute for Inventions; German Wikipedia also lists an innovation prize in 1996. The magazine stereo, in its 2016 obituary, credited him with 40 patents.

One driver, made by hand.

The product the company is built around is the Manger Sound Transducer, or Manger-Schallwandler: a round driver whose flat membrane has a nine-pointed, star-shaped outline, lite magazin noted in 2016. The first loudspeaker to use it was the Diskus, a one-way speaker in a round cabinet, which German Wikipedia says was marketed from 1979, citing Stereoplay; the company calls it the S05 and says it won a design award, which it does not name. The fully active MSS studio monitor followed in 1986 and the Zerobox line between 1990 and 1996, the company says.

Small-series production of the transducer began in Mellrichstadt, a town in the Rhön near the borders with Hesse and Thuringia, in 1990, the company says, and each one takes more than eight hours of handwork. It describes a basket machined from solid duralumin, a membrane material developed by Josef Manger and made in its own laboratory to a closely guarded formula, fifteen neodymium magnets and 32 parts assembled by hand, with each transducer numbered on its basket. Those are the company’s claims. The independent description comes from fairaudio, which visited in May 2025: the transducers are made, and the speakers given their final assembly, at the Mellrichstadt headquarters, while the cabinets are delivered by an outside specialist firm, and output runs to about one transducer a day.

The numbers are small. German Wikipedia, citing lite magazin, says about 14,000 loudspeakers had been made by the end of 2016, roughly 500 a year, and that newer two-way models add a conventional driver below 80 Hz. Daniela Manger told fairaudio that sales had once been split 60 per cent in Germany and 40 per cent abroad, and that rising freight costs were making exports harder.

The current range, the company’s website shows, comprises the s1, p1, p2, c1, z1 and w1. The c1 studio monitor, designed by Stefan Harlé, won a Focus Open gold award in 2012, the company says; the p2 was launched at the High End show, then held in Munich, in May 2018, and in 2024 the company introduced a new generation of the transducer, the W06.

Design and documentation.

Germany’s high-end loudspeaker makers do not share a single school. Some build on horns, some rethink the driver itself, and some put the amplifiers inside the cabinet and let electronics correct for the box and the room. The seven brands in this guide cover all three approaches, and the electronics that drive them.

Avantgarde Acoustic, at Lautertal in the Odenwald hills of Hesse, builds its range around horn loudspeakers, according to its website. Manger took a different route: its company timeline says Josef W. Manger filed his first patent in 1968 for what became a bending-wave transducer, the Manger Schallwandler, and that small-series production began in Mellrichstadt, in northern Bavaria, in 1990.

Active designs are the third strand. Backes & Müller, in Saarbrücken, marks fifty years of active, sensor-controlled loudspeakers on its website. Kii Audio, registered in Bergisch Gladbach near Cologne and building its speakers at Hamminkeln, near Wesel, sells active speakers with what it calls cardioid technology, meant to cut reflections from the room. Lyravox, in Hamburg, gives each driver its own amplifier and uses a digital signal processor in place of a passive crossover.

The electronics makers have roots in the Ruhr. Einstein Audio Components is registered in Bochum, and Audionet’s legal notice gave a Bochum address in 2015 and a Berlin one by 2018, according to archived versions of its website; the brand now belongs to audionet GmbH, registered in Berlin.

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 daughter’s company.

The company has stayed in the family. German Wikipedia says Josef Manger’s daughter Daniela Manger has run it since 1990 and that he withdrew from day-to-day business in 1994, aged 65, to concentrate on research; lowbeats wrote in 2016 that he formally handed the company to her in the mid-1990s. In 2016 the regional chamber of commerce, the IHK Würzburg-Schweinfurt, honoured her for 25 years in the business, the company says, adding that it had by then been based in Mellrichstadt for 25 years. fairaudio describes her as a trained electrical engineer. Josef W. Manger died on 27 October 2016, aged 87, stereo reported.

The website’s legal notice names Daniela Manger as responsible, at Hendunger Straße 53 in Mellrichstadt, and lists Manger, Manger-Schallwandler and High Definition Sound as registered trademarks of “Manger Audio – Daniela Manger.” We found no outside owner or investor in the sources we checked. The site says “100% Made in Germany”; what fairaudio saw supports that for the transducers and final assembly in Mellrichstadt, with the cabinets bought in from an outside workshop.

For a design guide, Manger shows how a single technical idea can become a brand’s whole identity: the star-shaped membrane is both what the company makes and the shape people recognise. Compare MBL, another German maker built around an unconventional driver, and Audio Physic. For this guide we use graphite, an aluminium grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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