Zed Audio

The Early Years

Zed Audio was formed in the summer of 1983. The company began building product during October of that year. I had been exporting car stereo amplifiers to the USA for about 2 years, prior to my coming to settle here. The company forwhich we were designing and manufacturing was Hifonics (you remember all those funny names (Thor, Odin, Zeus, Colossus) they were the trademark of this company. Amplifiers in those early days of car stereo were usually hampered by low power, ugly cosmetics and unreliability but not necessarily in that order.

My background was in professional sound and recording studios. High powered amplifiers were not new to me (see The history of myself) on this site.

During the early 1980s the power race in the car began just as in home stereo during 1971. Zed was the first company to build a 200w per channel car amplifier in December1983, this was the first generation of Hifonics Zeus.

1985 we built the first true 3 band parametric equalizer in a dash mount chassis.

1986 we built the first one third octave equalizer.

1986 we built the then highest powered amplifier, Colossus, at 600w per channel.

1986 we built the first multi-channel amplifier with on board variable frequency crossovers.

1987 we built the first 6 channel amplifier with on board variable frequency crossovers.

During the next 20 years Zed manufactured for several car audio companies as well as some home stereo companies. We also produced guitar amplifiers for awhile but the music industry was not one in which we wanted to remain so I opted out of that enterprise.

During 2003 guys were asking me why we did not bring out our own line of amplifiers. I thought about this for a few months and then we made the decision to take 'the plunge'

We wanted to develop a line of amplifiers which was of the highest quality in terms of sound, ultra reliable and had more of an industrial look. I hope that I have achieved all three. I spent the better part of nine months designing and listening to a few designs and then settled on what we are producing today. All of my listening was done on my home system which of course does not suffer from many of the problems which plague car systems.

In the Spring of 2009, we made a decision to bring to market a range of ultralight, efficient and very high quality amplifiers. These were introduced in late August of 2009. The first two amplifiers, KRONOS a rather unique 2 channel offering and LEVIATHAN a 6 channel with an output of 150w x 6.

The line expanded to include DRACONIA rated at 175w x 4 and MINOTAUR rated at 750w x 1. LEVIATHAN had a power increase to 190W x 6 and we added RA a rather unique subwoofer preamplifier which contains a Sub harmonic Synthesizer and a variable threshold compressor.