Origin Acoustics

The brand

History

The Origin Acoustics story begins decades before its name existed. In 1976, Ken Humphries and Ed Haase opened a small sound shop in Riverside, California, driven purely by a passion for music. In the early 1980s, the pair invented a concept that would change the industry forever: the in-wall speaker, installed flush with the wall — the birth of the architectural audio category. Between 1985 and 1994, they designed and built millions of in-wall speakers for some of the biggest brands in the industry, becoming the world's reference source for invisible sound.

In 1994, Ken and Ed launched their own brand, SpeakerCraft®, driven by the vision of the young entrepreneur Jeremy Burkhardt, who led the company to absolute leadership of the custom installation market for more than a decade. After SpeakerCraft was acquired by a large conglomerate, Burkhardt reunited with his original partners, Ken and Ed, to start again from scratch — applying decades of accumulated experience to an entirely new project.

And so Origin Acoustics was born in 2014, once again redefining the category its founders had invented four decades earlier. With proprietary technologies such as the Zip-Clip tool-free installation system and the DPSD tweeter, the brand quickly reached second place in popularity among architectural audio brands, according to CE Pro's 2019 industry analysis — a remarkable rise for a company founded only five years earlier. Today, Origin Acoustics remains true to the motto that has guided its founders from the start: "it's all about the music."