Lars Hansen’s devotion to audio began when he was a teenager in Winnipeg, Canada during the early 1970s. He began buying — and upgrading — components, and one particular upgrade, to the Dahlquist DQ10 loudspeaker, sparked his desire to design and manufacture speakers of his own. Later, after graduating from university and studying both electronics and acoustics at college in Winnipeg, he designed an entire line of mainstream speakers then subsequently seguéd to the audio industry’s business side. Perhaps inevitably, he brought the wealth of knowledge he had gained there back to the loudspeaker arena and, in the 1990s, assumed the presidency of Dahlquist Corporation, which was no longer in the hands of its talented founder. There he spearheaded an ambitious effort that included developing a new version of the celebrated DQ10, but it soon became apparent that the corporation wasn’t ready to finance a project to produce reference standard speakers. So Lars made what now seems another inevitable choice: he founded his own firm. Though Hansen Audio is still relatively young, the list of superlatives that discriminating critics have used to describe its speakers attests to the wisdom of that decision.
Lars Hansen’s devotion to audio began when he was a teenager in Winnipeg, Canada during the early 1970s. He began buying — and upgrading — components, and one particular upgrade, to the Dahlquist DQ10 loudspeaker, sparked his desire to design and manufacture speakers of his own. Later, after graduating from university and studying both electronics and acoustics at college in Winnipeg, he designed an entire line of mainstream speakers then subsequently seguéd to the audio industry’s business side. Perhaps inevitably, he brought the wealth of knowledge he had gained there back to the loudspeaker arena and, in the 1990s, assumed the presidency of Dahlquist Corporation, which was no longer in the hands of its talented founder. There he spearheaded an ambitious effort that included developing a new version of the celebrated DQ10, but it soon became apparent that the corporation wasn’t ready to finance a project to produce reference standard speakers. So Lars made what now seems another inevitable choice: he founded his own firm. Though Hansen Audio is still relatively young, the list of superlatives that discriminating critics have used to describe its speakers attests to the wisdom of that decision.