American Made Audio Products

Full disclosure - Speaker designer-manufacturer

I like to believe that most manufactures try to be honest with their Made in USA claims. There are government guidelines in some cases. In some cases US made parts at competitive prices don't exist and often don't exist at all. For example, I once needed to source a fractional, direct drive oil-less air compressor for systems that had to be DOD complaint which requires them to be Made in USA for the most part. There are exceptions and guidelines. The exceptions and guidelines are so complicated and vary from one jurisdiction to the next that we decided to source US made units. There are hundreds of choices of non-US made units. After months of research I found only two US manufactures that built what we needed. We paid 50% more for them. Their quality, engineering and technical support were top notch.

The world has been moving to a global economy for a while. It's challenging to unravel the origin of every part. We design and build our own AMT drivers in the USA. That said, we source steel from a US company and buy it per spec not origin. Blanks are cut in the US on machines of unknown origin (to us) then blanks are fully machined to spec in the US. The custom Neodymium magnets are made to our specs in the US but we don't spec the origin the raw materials. Probably from China. The pleated diaphragms are made in the US. Some of the adhesives are from the US and some are not. The BoPET substrate is likely not from the US. This example is only for the AMT drivers. I won't go into the rest of the speaker.

We take pride in building as much of our product as we can in the US for a variety of reasons. We try to support local business and our economy as much as we can. Personally, I enjoy developing good working relationships with our vendors and having a person to directly speak with when needed. I have been using the same machine shop for about 20 years now. Started dealing with Sr. and now working with the son. 

We are not at all apposed to using non-US parts if we have too. We use Italian made drivers and German caps for our Atlas. If there are equal parts, one made in the US and the other not, I will likely buy the US made part. Being a small company allows us to be more selective that way. Big "bottom line" companies have a different business model.

So, are our speakers "Made in the USA"? We think they are. Or should we say "Made on Earth"?

@dinov No worries at all. My question was: do all the internal parts need to be made in the U.S.A. to meet the standards in your OP?

@hilde45 thanks, as for your question I wasn’t really thinking about that because it’s almost a given that a large majority the the internal parts, ie transistors capacitors etc. are not made in the US, as is the same for many of the other non-us based companies. Perhaps, irrelevant in todays age. 

@dinov Nice resource to have and I saved the site for future reference. 👍🏻

@dinov  Understood. Some folks make a point of buying American especially when they want to deprive other countries (with questionable politics/ethics) of profits. So, it becomes a kind of ludicrous thing to try, sometimes, given how many countries make internal parts for so-called American products. The question then becomes, why bother making the ethical point in such an ineffective way.