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The Rebirth of Mirage Loudspeakers?
Mirage Loudspeakers are coming back. The storied Canadian brand has been reborn and we’re really excited to see if the M-1 is returning.
If you are old enough to remember Mirage Loudspeakers (or follow ’80s vintage hi-fi) — this might prove to be very exciting news. Over the weekend, we were alerted by industry insiders that Premium Audio Company (PAC) COO, Oscar Bernardo, was leaving the company to relaunch Mirage.
Do you remember the storied Canadian brand that was eventually acquired by Audio Products International?
Bose tried to acquire Mirage prior to the API purchase but it never came to fruition.
Mirage was started back in 1979 by Jeff Percy, Jeff Soltysek, and Patrick Dempster. What a lot of audiophiles probably don’t know is that famed loudspeaker designer, Kevin Voecks (Revel, Snell Acoustics), created the original Mirage loudspeaker designs.
The first few years for Mirage were focused on rather high quality, but affordable two-way loudspeakers that did relatively well in the marketplace.
Voecks, who owned another loudspeaker company in the United States, sold that business and moved to Toronto to become the lead designer at Mirage.
The aforementioned Bose acquisition fell through when the Toronto group realized that it would mean that the company would be relocated to Massachusetts and there wasn’t a lot of support for that internally.
The brand was fortunate to secure private financing to expand its manufacturing capabilities and develop a proper dealer network in the United States; something that became a problem when demand outstripped their ability to create product fast enough after a series of very positive reviews in the high-end press.
Too much success has killed more than a few high-end brands which lacked the ability to scale up their operations.
This article originally appeared at ecoustics.com and an intro has been published here with permission.
Read the full article: https://www.ecoustics.com/news/rebirth-mirage-loudspeakers/
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