A Brief History Of RSL Speaker Systems
If you happen to live in the Southern California area, you may be familiar with RSL Speaker Systems or Rogersound Labs. In 1970, RSL started in a small shop in North Hollywood that contained a showroom and a small speaker factory. RSL offered their speakers factory-direct. RSL Speaker Systems became one of the best selling speaker brands in Southern California, especially in radio stations and recording studios. People appreciated the fact that, at their reasonable prices, they offered superior sound quality and were literally designed to last a lifetime.
In the stores, RSL Speaker Systems were offered along with audio components (and later video components). Rogersound Labs was blessed with a group of terrific people who made up the RSL family. The salespeople were required to be knowledgeable and did not work on commission. As a result, the stores were set up to be a pressure-free environment. Rogersound Labs grew to 8 stores and became the number one Audio/Video specialist chain in Southern California. For the extreme enthusiast Rogersound Labs opened Upscale Audio which offered the world's finest, price-no-object audio components.
In 1989, Rogersound Labs was sold. Soon after, the original owners and management left the company and retired. Unfortunately, under the new ownership, the company did not prosper and went out of business in 1992. After that, the original founder was able to purchase the company's name back.
Background Of Our Current Speaker Line (from Howard Rodgers)
I was enjoying my retirement from Rogersound Labs and decided that it was about time to build a home theater for the family. The topic came up of which speakers to use in the theater. Over the years, I had been thinking about some new approaches to speaker design including refinements on our patented Compression Guide tuning technology. I also was eager to build a Compression Guide subwoofer and the home theater project would be an excellent opportunity to test these ideas. So, I purchased some of the finest and most expensive parts available. After all, these would be speakers not designed for mass production. After many months of research and development, the prototypes were perfected. The ideas worked extremely well. So much so, in fact that some of my audiophile friends said I should offer these speakers for sale. Among them was my oldest son who said he would really enjoy being a part of a small speaker company.
The problem I told him was that RSL Speaker Systems had always stood for excellent sound at a great price. These speakers were very expensive to build and they would have to sell for around $1,500 to $2,000 for each satellite speaker! Even though they sounded better than other comparably-priced speakers, I felt uncomfortable about selling expensive speakers to only a select few customers. We have always stood for value. So, what we decided to do was to have the prototypes serve as audio standards to see how close we could get to their sound in a speaker that most people could actually afford.
We worked on it for almost three years. We hauled prototypes to our friends who own hi-end audio shops in Southern California. I’m happy to tell you that, believe it or not, the production versions of the speakers actually sound a bit better than the prototypes! And the prices are a fraction of what the prototypes would have had to sell for. I’m sure you’ll agree that they live up to our reputation of great speaker values at very low factory direct prices. For me personally, I hope that they provide a thrilling performance every time you listen to them. A lot of people who are familiar with RSL Speakers, feel that our previous speakers are a hard act to follow. We’ve worked hard and are confident you won’t be disappointed.
