Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Audio equipment design and manufacturing |
Founded | 1993 |
Founders | Charles Hansen, Peter Bohacek, Katie Lehr |
Headquarters | Boulder, Colorado |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products | High-end audio processing equipment |
Number of employees | 18 [1] (2014) |
Website | ayre |
Ayre Acoustics Inc. is an American manufacturer of high-performance, high-fidelity audio components and systems co-founded in 1993 by Charles Hansen, Katie Lehr, and Peter Bohacek. [2] [3]
The audio output circuitry of the PonoPlayer was designed by engineers at Ayre Acoustics. [4] [5]
Neil Percival Young is a Canadian and American singer-songwriter. After embarking on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s, Young moved to Los Angeles, joining the folk-rock group Buffalo Springfield. Since the beginning of his solo career, often with backing by the band Crazy Horse, he has released critically acclaimed albums such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), After the Gold Rush (1970), Harvest (1972), On the Beach (1974), and Rust Never Sleeps (1979). He was also a part-time member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with whom he recorded the chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu.
Acoustical engineering is the branch of engineering dealing with sound and vibration. It includes the application of acoustics, the science of sound and vibration, in technology. Acoustical engineers are typically concerned with the design, analysis and control of sound.
Yamaha Corporation is a Japanese musical instrument and audio equipment manufacturer.
Marantz is a company that develops and sells high-end audio products. The company was founded in New York, but is now based in California.
Bang & Olufsen (B&O) is a Danish high-end consumer electronics company that designs and manufactures audio products, television sets, and telephones, originally from Denmark, founded in 1925 by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, who designed a radio to work with alternating current, a product of significance at a time when most radios were still running on batteries.
Live Rust is a live album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, recorded during their fall 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour.
Boston Acoustics was an American manufacturer of home and mobile audio equipment founded in 1979. The company produced speakers for home, custom/architectural, and car audio.
Meridian Audio is a consumer audio and home theatre equipment manufacturer based in the United Kingdom. Bob Stuart and Allen Boothroyd founded the company in 1977 under the name Boothroyd-Stuart. In 1985 the company released a CD player under the brand name, Meridian. The company also created the lossless compression format Meridian Lossless Packing in 1998 and the lossy Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) format in 2014.
AKG Acoustics is an acoustics engineering and manufacturing company. It was founded in 1947 by Rudolf Görike and Ernest Plass in Vienna, Austria. It is a part of Harman International Industries, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics since 2017.
Ted Jensen is an American mastering engineer, known for having mastered many recordings, including the Eagles' Hotel California, Green Day's American Idiot and Norah Jones' Come Away with Me.
An audio engineer helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduction, and reinforcement of sound. Audio engineers work on the "technical aspect of recording—the placing of microphones, pre-amp knobs, the setting of levels. The physical recording of any project is done by an engineer…"
Elliot Mazer was an American audio engineer and record producer. He was best known for his work with Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Band, and Janis Joplin. In addition, he worked on film and television projects for ABC and various independent studios, and taught at University of North Carolina at Asheville and Elon University.
Beats Electronics LLC is an American consumer audio products manufacturer headquartered in Culver City, California. The company was founded in 2006 by music producer Dr. Dre and record company executive Jimmy Iovine. Since 2014, it has been an Apple subsidiary.
Pono was a portable digital media player and music download service for high-resolution audio. It was developed by musician Neil Young and his company PonoMusic, which raised money for development and initial production through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. Production and shipments to backers started in October 2014, and shipments to the general public began in the first quarter of 2015.
Charles Emory Hughes II is an American inventor and audio engineer. He is known for his work on loudspeaker design, and the measurement of professional audio sound systems. Hughes first worked for Peavey Electronics designing loudspeakers and horns where he was granted a patent for the Quadratic-Throat Waveguide horn used in concert loudspeakers. He worked for Altec Lansing for two years as chief engineer for the pro audio division and was granted two more patents. In 2021, Hughes was hired by Biamp as principal engineer.
High-resolution audio is a term for audio files with greater than 44.1 kHz sample rate or higher than 16-bit audio bit depth. It commonly refers to 96 or 192 kHz sample rates. However, 44.1 kHz/24-bit, 48 kHz/24-bit and 88.2 kHz/24-bit recordings also exist that are labeled HD Audio.
The FiiO X Series is a line of portable music players designed and manufactured by the Chinese company FiiO Electronics Technology.
PonoPlayer is a portable music player created by Neil Young's company, PonoMusic, as the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) is a proprietary system for delivering high-quality digital audio. The system includes audio signal processing, lossy audio compression and authentication. MQA requires licensing fees to use. The system was launched in 2014 by Meridian Audio, and is now owned by Lenbrook.
Tidal is a Norwegian-American music streaming service, launched in 2014 by the Norwegian-Swedish public company Aspiro. Tidal is now majority-owned by Block, Inc., the owner of the point-of-sale system Square.
Ayre Acoustics Inc., an 18-person company that has been quietly doing business in Boulder since 1993, is enjoying its 15 minutes of fame generated this week by the launch of Neil Young's PonoMusic digital music player.
This week Neil Young announced the kickstarter program for his soon to be released PonoPlayer proudly acknowledging that the circuit design was done by the R&D team at Ayre Acoustics!
Last year, Pono announced that it had teamed up with high-end audio company Meridian to produce the player ... in recent months, Pono shifted its focus and actually switched hardware partners, replacing Meridian with Ayre, another high-end audio equipment maker.