Three surnames and a loudspeaker shaped like a lamp.

MBL began in Berlin in 1979. Its name is made from the surnames of its three founders. The first is clear: Wolfgang Meletzky, whom the company describes as a young electronics engineer. The other two are spelled differently from one source to the next. The company’s English website gives “Bienecke” and “Lehnhardt”; its German website, as we read it, gives “Bieneke” and “Lenhard”; Stereophile, in a 2021 review, wrote “Bienecke and Lenhardt (the B and L in ‘MBL’)”; and an interview with the current chief executive in Stereo Times gives “Beinecke, Lehnhardt.” We found no first names for either, so we give only the surnames and note the differences.

The company was built around one product, the Radialstrahler — German for “radial radiator.” The company says Meletzky wanted a loudspeaker that sent sound outward in every direction, the way a light bulb sends out light, instead of beaming it from a box towards a single listening seat. The story the company tells about where the idea came from was repeated in Stereophile’s 2021 review, which credited it to MBL’s North American distributor: Meletzky flexed a few playing cards near his ear, noticed how the bending cards moved the air, and that observation led to a patent on the radial tweeter concept in 1979. The review added that the two engineering partners had trouble making the idea work reliably at first. We treat this as company lore; we did not find the patent itself.

The company says the first model, the MBL 100 Radialstrahler, was shown to the public at the IFA consumer-electronics fair in Berlin in 1979, with a “rocket” shape and stabilising fins.

Lamellae, a preamplifier and a flagship.

The Radialstrahler drivers do not use the usual cone or dome. Stereophile described them as thin carbon-fibre strips called lamellae, glued by hand into bowed arcs that flex in and out around a vertical axis, so that the sound leaves in a full circle. That shape — stacked, segmented forms on top of a cabinet — is what makes an MBL speaker recognisable across a room.

The company’s own chronology sets out how the range grew. In 1982 an electro-acoustics student, Jürgen Reis, saw the Radialstrahler at IFA and was later hired as a development engineer; Meletzky eventually made him chief engineer. Stereophile described Reis in 2021 as MBL’s chief engineer and technical designer. In 1986 the company added its first electronics, the 6010 preamplifier, which it says grew out of an internal project led by Reis, and the same year the MBL 100 became the MBL 101, with carbon-fibre segments in place of aluminium. A 90-kilogram power amplifier, the 9010, followed in 1993, and a CD transport and a digital-to-analogue converter in the mid-1990s. In 1997 the 101 became a four-way system with a built-in subwoofer, the company says.

In 2007 MBL introduced the 101 X-Treme, which stacks two 101 driver arrays nose to nose and adds tall bass columns; the company says production is limited to twelve systems a year. Later came the Cadenza electronics line, first called Corona, in 2011, and a second generation of the Noble line in 2016. The current website lists six Radialstrahler models, from the 101 X-Treme MKIII to the smaller 120 and 126, and three electronics lines: Reference, Noble and Cadenza. Stereophile listed the 120 at $24,900 a pair in 2021.

The company says it sells in 44 countries; it also says MBL has worked with the Cologne period-instrument orchestra Concerto Köln since 2009.

Design and documentation.

Germany has a long record in consumer audio. Braun, founded in 1921 and now part of Procter & Gamble, is known for its design of the 1960s to the 1980s, English Wikipedia says; Grundig, founded by Max Grundig in 1945 and based for most of its life in Fürth, became a leading maker of radios and televisions before filing for insolvency in 2003.

For more than two decades the hi-fi trade met at the HIGH END show in Munich, run by the HIGH END SOCIETY. In September 2024 the society announced that the show would leave Munich’s MOC, audioXpress reported, and in June 2026 it opened for the first time at the Austria Center Vienna, with about 23,100 visitors, according to sempre-audio.at.

German magazines such as STEREO, stereoplay, AUDIO and FIDELITY review the country’s hi-fi equipment.

Some makers sell direct rather than through dealers. Teufel, founded in Berlin in 1979, switched in 1990 from specialist retailers to direct sales by catalogue, English Wikipedia says, and Nubert describes itself on its website as a direct seller, a “Direktvertrieb.”

The makers in this guide are spread across the country: MBL and Teufel in Berlin, T+A in Herford in Westphalia, Canton at Weilrod in the Taunus, Quadral at Isernhagen near Hanover, Nubert in Schwäbisch Gmünd and Audio Physic in Brilon in the Sauerland, according to the legal notices on their websites.

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 Meletzky to Hermeling to Chow Tai Seng.

Ownership changed in 2008. The company says Meletzky retired that year, after the launch of the 101 X-Treme, and that the entrepreneur Christian Hermeling became its new owner and chief executive. In December 2023 the website’s legal notice named the company as MBL Akustikgeräte GmbH & Co. KG, on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, represented through its general partner by Hermeling.

The products are not made in the city itself. In July 2022 the Barnim district administration in Brandenburg, after its district chief visited the factory, said MBL products had been made in Eberswalde, north-east of Berlin, since 1992, by a company called C.E.R.T. GmbH & Co. KG in the town’s technology park, with about 40 staff there. Hermeling told the district that all MBL loudspeakers and electronics were “komplett ‘Made in Eberswalde’” — completely made in Eberswalde. The company’s website says it makes every component and loudspeaker in-house, by “a mixture of high-tech and handcraft.”

In 2025 the company ran into trouble. MBL Akustikgeräte GmbH & Co. KG filed for insolvency on 27 May 2025, and proceedings opened at the Charlottenburg district court in Berlin on 1 August, according to the law firm PLUTA, whose lawyer Frank Brachwitz was the administrator. On 30 September PLUTA announced that the business had been sold by asset transfer to Chow Tai Seng, a Chinese luxury-goods group, with effect from 1 October 2025. It said the Berlin headquarters and the Eberswalde factory would both continue, that about 50 jobs were kept and that creditors would be paid in full. The magazine Stereo reported that Chow Tai Seng is mainly a jewellery business with more than 4,700 shops in China, that it owns United Audio, a distributor of high-end audio in China, and that MBL is the first audio maker it has bought; Hermeling stayed on as chief executive and said the team and the company’s values would be kept. The website’s legal notice now names MBL International GmbH, at the same Kurfürstendamm address, a company entered in the Berlin commercial register in September 2025.

For a design guide, MBL shows how a single unusual shape can carry a brand through changes of founder, owner and country of ownership. Compare Burmester, another Berlin high-end maker, and Audio Physic, a German loudspeaker maker. For this guide we use piano black, gold and brushed aluminium with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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