Company History

As any pro-audio veteran will tell you, many of the industry's major players began life as small "mom and pop" operations, run out of garages, basements and spare bedrooms. Steeped in the anti-corporate ethos of the '60s and '70s, these were businesses born of the visions of young entrepreneurs typically short on experience but rich in dreams, drive, and a desire to do things differently.

As the industry and its technology have evolved, many of those early ventures have fallen by the wayside. Some of them imploded, fueled by naive management, personality crises, or simply a failure to evolve. Some grew so large and unwieldy that their only hope for survival was to be bought out by the corporate culture they'd long resisted. Over the years, only a handful have managed to not simply exist, but flourish.

The story of QSC Audio is one of professional audio's most inspiring tales. From its humble beginnings crafting handmade guitar amps from a one-room shop in Orange County, California, QSC has grown to become the industry's undisputed leader in power amps, loudspeakers, and complete networked audio solutions.

The Early Years

The story began one day in 1968, when Barry Andrews' motorcycle broke down in an industrial park in Costa Mesa, California. While waiting for a friend to pick him up, Barry struck up a conversation with a guy working in a nearby garage.

Pat Quilter told Barry about his fledgling business, designing and building various types of amplifiers. In the heyday of Hendrix, Cream and acid rock, Pat's best opportunities seemed to lie with the growing market of local guitar and bass players, and Barry's experience in building speaker cabinets looked to be a natural fit. Working out of a cramped 800-square-foot shop, the two men joined forces, determined to change the world with products like the Quilter Sound Thing and the Duck Amp.

Operating on a shoestring budget, the company's beginnings were a typical saga of youthful optimism and negative cash flow. Securing minimal funding, they hired a small staff and set out to build their amps and spread the word. Managing to strategically place their amps at prominent clubs on Sunset Strip, they won praise (but little else) from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Doors and other bands of the day.

Sadly, the company's debt grew faster than their reputation, and when the money ran out they found themselves back at square one. "Those were definitely the days when we didn't know when we drove up if there would be a sheriff's padlock on the door," recalls Barry. Pat adds, "but even through those dark days, the thought of having to go out and get a 'real' job motivated us to work even harder."

A deal was struck with a Berkeley music shop to trade amps for guitars, resulting in a fairly unique promotional campaign - buy an amp, get a guitar for free. In the front half of their tiny shop, they would sell directly to musicians, drawn primarily by word of mouth. "It was a bit of crazy cycle," Pat remembers. "We'd get the word out, and people would come in to check out our amps. We'd be busy selling, so we wouldn't have time to make any product. Then we'd run out of amps and have to close the doors for a few days while we made more."

Just as the company was beginning to make a bit of money, they suffered yet another setback. "Someone cut a hole in the roof one night, came in and stole all our finished goods," Barry relates. "To add insult to injury, they went through our stock of guitar strings and, instead of just taking the whole carton, they picked out only the good ones, leaving the gauges no one wanted."

But even in the face of adversity, the partners stuck to what they knew was right. The values of hard work, honesty and integrity would become the bedrock of their company. "We had a negative net worth for several years running, and didn't know how we were going to pay the bills, but we made sure we never burned anyone," Pat asserts. "We've always really believed nice guys finish first."

Getting Serious

The two partners soon began to realize there was more to this business of running a business than just making a good product and hoping the world would discover it. "We wanted to make a name for ourselves, but we were pretty clueless as far as running a company went," Barry remarks. "We had to invent a lot of it from scratch as we went along."

The company incorporated as QSC Audio Products, Inc. Pat concentrated on designing and building the amplifiers, Barry took charge of sales and marketing, and Barry's brother John, who had recently obtained his business degree from USC, was brought in to handle the finances.

This clear division of responsibility immediately began to reap other advantages. The three partners found they had not only a mutual respect for each others' areas of expertise, but a mutual humility and ability to admit their own shortcomings. While perhaps inexperienced at running a business, they knew enough to know they had a lot to learn. There was a willingness to struggle with the basics, and many late nights were spent consciously reviewing not only their decisions, but the decision-making process itself. "We knew there was a lot we simply didn't know," Pat explains. "Rather than try to delude ourselves, we recognized that in order to grow, we had to learn what it takes to be a successful company. It was about more than just making our products better - though that was a major emphasis - it was about improving ourselves and our focus."

It is this absence of hubris, this humility and quiet pride, that has governed the company from its inception, and still exists today.

The '70s - A Decade of Change

By the early '70s, the guitar amp market was being dominated by a few prominent companies. Names like Marshall, Ampeg, Vox and Kustom were becoming the undisputed leaders in the field. The emergence of progressive rock, led by bands like Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, saw the synthesizer begin to overtake the guitar as the instrument of choice.

At the same time, a new market was beginning to emerge. A young company called Tapco released their first small mixer, and the Japanese manufacturer Teac introduced a "semi-pro" four-track tape recorder. Though no one could foresee the profound and long-ranging effect these early products would eventually have, their immediate effect was not lost on the partners. "Through all the musical trends, the one thing that remained relatively constant was the power amp, and the one thing we knew really well was power amp technology," Barry remarks. "It began to make sense to us that we should play to our strengths, and concentrate on what we did best. We decided to become the world's largest amp company - which was pretty ambitious, considering we'd never even made a profit up until then."

"It began to become clear we'd reached a fork in the road," Pat recalls." We had to decide whether we wanted to be retailers or manufacturers. It was a big leap of faith, since direct-retail sales offered a much higher profit margin, but after much soul searching we decided it made more sense to focus on what we did best, which was power amp technology, and try to increase our output volume."

A number of OEM deals followed, working together with companies like Mitchell, Furman, Alembic, and the very first AC-powered Pignose amp. While these products hardly set the industry ablaze, they were enough to keep the doors open and motivate the partners to new heights. The steady stream of orders honed their chops as manufacturers, increasing their efficiency and fine-tuning their business savvy. "It was about that time we started working with manufacturer's reps," recalls Barry. "We didn't even know what a rep was before then. We'd never even gone to any trade shows."

And so a trailer was attached to the back of Barry's 1970 El Dorado, and the company made their trade show debut at the 1977 NAMM show. The industry was in flux, with new startups emerging and jockeying for brand recognition. Names like Community and JBL were becoming known as loudspeaker specialists, and companies like Tapco became identified with mixers. QSC had found their niche. "Everyone began to become specialists, and we became known as amp specialists," Pat recounts. "The industry was developing and diversifying, and all these companies - speaker manufacturers, amp manufacturers, mixer manufacturers - fed off each others' energies, coming together in separate camps to create a holistic system. Everyone had a different part in the band, so to speak, and we had found our instrument."

Another product of the partners' '60s ethic was an understanding of the value of integrity. "We saw early on that our credibility would be judged by our products' reliability," Pat relates. "If we didn't build it right, we'd have to fix it later. More importantly, we had to face our customers, so we knew we had to treat them right and create a dependable product."

It was this understanding of the need for reliability that drove Pat to design some of the company's more innovative technologies, including the AC Coupled circuit topology that earned the company their first patent in 1978, and is still the basis of their core technology.

Big dreams had begun to become reality. The little amp company that had begun the '70s with little more than aspirations and debt had, by the end of the decade, reached a turning point. QSC had established themselves as a rising star in the industry, with several patents to their name, a growing line of highly acclaimed products, and a reputation for quality and attention to detail. As if to confirm the significance of the past ten years' work, 1979 marked the first year the company broke $1million in sales. QSC was primed and ready to move forward.