A Berkeley engineer, a Swiss laboratory and a business partner.

Meyer Sound Laboratories was founded in 1979 by John Meyer and Helen Meyer, according to both the company and English Wikipedia. It is usually described as a Berkeley company, and it is one today, but the company’s own history says it began in a small industrial park in San Leandro, a few miles south, and moved to San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley in December 1983. English Wikipedia’s article on John Meyer says the same.

The route there was long. John Meyer grew up in Berkeley; English Wikipedia and the company say he was working in a Berkeley hi-fi shop in 1967 when he built an amplification system for the Steve Miller Band to use at the Monterey Pop Festival. His first company, Glyph, built huge horn-loaded systems; The New Yorker reported in 2015 that it “foundered” because not even “the most opulent psychedelic bands” could travel with speakers whose horns were four and eight feet across. Meyer then worked for McCune Sound Service in San Francisco, where, English Wikipedia says, he built an integrated tri-amplified system for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s last tour, and he advised the Grateful Dead, playing a part in the band’s Wall of Sound.

In 1973 he was invited to set up an acoustics laboratory at the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies in Switzerland — in Montreux, according to English Wikipedia’s biography of him, while its company article links the institute to Lausanne, so we give only the country. There he designed a studio monitor for a Swiss company, and the company says Meyer Sound was formed partly to be the exclusive US distributor of that Meyer/ACD monitor. Helen Meyer, whom The New Yorker describes as a Russian Studies major at the University of California, set about, in its words, “turning John’s audio enthusiasms into a viable business.”

The trapezoid, SIM and the self-powered loudspeaker.

The early products set the pattern. The company says one of the first things it made was the 650 subwoofer, built for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, whose original 70 mm release toured with a custom quadraphonic sound system, English Wikipedia says. In 1979 came the UM-1 UltraMonitor, a stage monitor that began a long association with the Grateful Dead. In 1980, at the request of the Broadway sound designer Abe Jacob, Meyer repackaged that technology as the UPA-1, which Live Design credited in 2007 with an immediate effect on theatre sound.

The UPA-1’s lasting contribution was its shape. Its trapezoidal cabinet let boxes be packed into curved arrays rather than flat walls; the company says it was granted a US design patent for it and that the shape is “now nearly ubiquitous.” The UPA-1 was among the first inductees into the Mix Foundation’s TECnology Hall of Fame in 2004. The MSL-10, which the company says was built for an installation at the Oakland Coliseum, followed in 1981, and in 1984 came SIM, source independent measurement, which let engineers use music itself as a test signal; its second version won an R&D 100 Award in 1992.

Then Meyer committed to self-powered loudspeakers, with the amplifiers and processing built into the cabinet. The HD-1 studio monitor of 1989 won a TEC Award in 1990, and the MSL-4 — dated 1994 by English Wikipedia and 1995 by the company — began the move for large concert systems; English Wikipedia says the whole loudspeaker line was converted over the following years. Later came the MILO line array, in 2003 according to the company, the LEO system for large tours and, in 2022, the PANTHER line array, which the company says made its debut on Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour at Croke Park in Dublin.

Touring sound and documentation.

Concerts and festivals are amplified by a few specialist loudspeaker makers. English Wikipedia credits L-Acoustics, founded by Christian Heil in 1984 and based at Marcoussis, south of Paris, with the V-DOSC line source array of 1992, and says most makers have since adopted the line array — a column of linked cabinets — for touring.

France has a second maker. Nexo, founded in 1979 and based at Plailly, north of Paris, says Yamaha completed its acquisition in 2008 and that its cabinets are designed and made in France. Germany’s d&b audiotechnik, founded in 1981 by Jürgen Daubert and Rolf Belz, is based in Backnang, near Stuttgart; the Paris private-equity firm Ardian bought it in 2016, Providence Equity Partners announced a significant investment in 2023, and the company says its products are handmade there.

Two are British. Martin Audio, founded by Dave Martin in 1971, is based in High Wycombe and was bought by Focusrite plc in December 2019, the companies announced. Funktion-One, formed in 1992 by Tony Andrews and John Newsham after they left Turbosound, is based near Dorking, Surrey, and English Wikipedia lists Berlin’s Berghain among the clubs using its systems.

In North America, Meyer Sound was founded in 1979 by John and Helen Meyer and is based in Berkeley, California. Adamson, which dates itself to 1984 in Vancouver, says it makes its systems at its own plant in Port Perry, Ontario.

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.

Still with its founders, still made in Berkeley.

Meyer Sound has grown into room acoustics as well as loudspeakers. In 2005 it acquired LCS Audio, a small digital-audio company, and in 2006 launched Constellation, an electronic system that changes the reverberation of a room using microphones, processing and loudspeakers; English Wikipedia says it is based on the VRAS technology developed by Mark Poletti at New Zealand’s Industrial Research Limited. The New Yorker described it in use at Oliveto, a Berkeley restaurant, and noted that Vienna’s Musikverein makes occasional use of Meyer components. In 2008 the United States Institute for Theatre Technology gave John and Helen Meyer its Harold Burris-Meyer Distinguished Career in Sound Design Award; John Meyer was made a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society in 2005 and received its Silver Medal in 2007, English Wikipedia says.

The company has stayed with its founders. The New Yorker called John and Helen Meyer its “proprietors” in 2015, and the sources we checked name no outside owner. It also still makes things in Berkeley. The same article described “research and manufacturing facilities” employing more than two hundred people in buildings across Berkeley’s warehouse district, where Kevlar was being fed into a German fabric machine to make woofer material. The company says its San Pablo Avenue building now holds the headquarters offices and its Pearson Theatre, while engineering and production have spread into six other buildings nearby, and that its assembly and transducer plants carry planetary names, Mars and Saturn.

For a design guide, Meyer Sound shows how an engineering company can build its identity on one idea — the self-powered loudspeaker — and keep it under one family’s roof for decades. Compare JBL and Electro-Voice, two other American loudspeaker names that, unlike Meyer, have changed hands. For this guide we use graphite, white and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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