A jazz bassist, three engineers and a preamplifier.

Mark Levinson began in Connecticut in the early 1970s as Mark Levinson Audio Systems, or MLAS, the company of a jazz bassist who became an audio designer. Harman, which now owns the brand, says Mark Levinson — “the person,” as its own history puts it — founded MLAS “in the spring of 1972”; English Wikipedia places the founding in Woodbridge, a suburb of New Haven. A 1986 federal appeals-court decision gives 1971 as the founding year and says the company was incorporated in 1976, so we note the difference.

Levinson worked with engineers who became well known in their own right. Harman names Dick Burwen, John Curl and Tom Colangelo, and counts the LNP-2 “low noise preamplifier” among the first products; English Wikipedia notes that the JC-1 and JC-2 preamplifiers carried Curl’s initials. The first amplifier, the ML-2 of 1977, was a 25-watt Class A mono design whose development Harman credits to Curl, followed in 1979 by the ML-3, a 200-watt-per-channel stereo amplifier.

The business struggled. By 1980, the court decision records, MLAS was “in serious financial trouble,” and Levinson asked Sanford “Sandy” Berlin, a retired audio-industry executive, to invest and help manage it; Berlin put in $480,000 of his own money and persuaded others to add $300,000. In employment agreements of December 1980 and March 1982, Levinson agreed to work only for MLAS and conveyed to it “the permanent and exclusive right, title and interest to the trade name ‘Mark Levinson’” for audio equipment.

The person and the brand part ways.

Those agreements are why the name and the man parted. Relations with the new management deteriorated, the appeals court found, and in the summer of 1984 Levinson left to found another company, Cello. In October 1984 three creditors forced MLAS into bankruptcy. Berlin then formed Madrigal Audio Laboratories, which at the auction of MLAS’s assets on 31 January 1985 — bidding against Cello — bought its equipment, inventory, blueprints and its trademark and trade-name rights for $150,000.

Madrigal sued in May 1985, and a federal judge in Connecticut barred Cello and Levinson from using the Levinson name and mark, an order they did not appeal. A second injunction, in 1986, went further, barring publicity about Levinson’s role at Cello; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it in August 1986. In short, Levinson could tell people what he designed, but he could not sell audio equipment under his own name.

Since then the brand and the man have had separate histories. English Wikipedia says Levinson ran Cello until 1998, founded Red Rose Music, with a shop on Madison Avenue in New York, in 1999, and moved to Switzerland in 2007 to found Daniel Hertz. It stresses that Mark Levinson-branded products have had no relationship with their founder since the mid-1980s, and that the name is intellectual property owned by Harman.

Design and documentation.

American high-end audio grew into a movement in the 1960s and 1970s, with its own press: Stereophile, founded in 1962 by J. Gordon Holt, and The Absolute Sound, founded in 1973 by Harry Pearson, according to English Wikipedia.

The makers grew up far apart. In Minnesota, William Z. Johnson founded Audio Research in Minneapolis in 1970, and Jim Winey’s Magnepan loudspeaker dates from 1969. In Connecticut, Mark Levinson started his company in 1972, and Dan and Rondi D’Agostino founded Krell in 1980. In Kentucky, Thiel began in Lexington in 1976; and in California, Richard Vandersteen took his Model 2 to the 1977 Consumer Electronics Show.

Several later changed hands. The Mark Levinson name passed to Madrigal Audio Laboratories at a bankruptcy auction in 1985, and Harman acquired Madrigal in 1995, Harman says; Samsung bought Harman in 2017. Audio Research was bought in 2008 by the Italian investor Quadrivio, whose Fine Sounds group was later renamed McIntosh Group, and was sold on in 2020 and 2023. Thiel was sold to a Nashville investor in 2012 and stopped operating in 2018. Krell closed after Rondi D’Agostino’s death in 2024; its repair service restarted in 2025, trade reports say.

Today Audio Research is in Maple Grove and Magnepan in White Bear Lake, Minnesota; Mark Levinson is part of Harman, based in Stamford, Connecticut; Krell remains in Connecticut; conrad-johnson builds by hand in Virginia; and Vandersteen is in Hanford, California, according to their websites and English Wikipedia.

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.

Madrigal, Harman, Lexus and Samsung.

Madrigal, based in Middletown, Connecticut, released its first product, the № 20 power amplifier, in 1986 — the first, Harman says, to use the “№” numero sign in a Mark Levinson model number, a habit the brand keeps today. Harman made a capital investment in Madrigal in 1993 and bought the remaining shares in 1995; its statement of results for fiscal 1996 said it had acquired the Mark Levinson and Proceed brands in September 1995 by purchasing Madrigal. English Wikipedia’s statement that Harman has owned the name “since 1990” is contradicted by both. Harman merged Madrigal with Lexicon into the Harman Specialty Group in 2002, and Harman itself was bought by Samsung Electronics in March 2017 for about $8 billion, keeping its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

The brand’s largest audience is now in cars. Harman says the Mark Levinson system in the Lexus LS430, released in 2000, began an exclusive relationship with Lexus that continues; English Wikipedia dates Mark Levinson options in Lexus models from 2001.

Where the home products are made has moved. In September 2006 the Harman Specialty Group named Mack Technologies of Westford, Massachusetts, as its manufacturing partner for Mark Levinson and Lexicon, with engineering in nearby Bedford. In 2013 Harman opened a Mark Levinson engineering centre in Shelton, Connecticut, whose first product was the № 585 integrated amplifier, and in late 2021, Harman wrote in January 2022, it moved the engineering and product teams to its campus in Northridge, California. The brand’s website still says its amplifiers are “designed and handcrafted in the USA,” with engineering in Shelton and “small-batch production at Mack Technologies” — wording that does not reflect the move Harman described, so we give it as the company’s claim.

English Wikipedia says a black anodized chassis has been associated with the brand from the beginning. Recent products include the 5000 Series, introduced in 2019, the № 5909 wireless headphones, launched at CES 2022, and the limited ML-50 amplifiers for the 50th anniversary, which Harman said borrowed the glass front panel and red illuminated logo of the № 53 of 2008.

For a design guide, Mark Levinson shows how a personal name can become a corporate asset that outlives its founder’s involvement. Compare Krell, founded by two of its former staff, and JBL, another Harman brand named after its founder. For this guide we use anodized black, glass grey and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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