There are few engineers as iconic and famous as Klaus Heinz. You’d think he’d be best known as the former face of ADAM Audio, one of the top pro-audio monitoring brands. Having worked for him, I noticed that his stardom goes way back to the 70s. You’d be surprised how many Hifi veterans kept drooling over his first company, ARCUS. This page (Hifi-Wiki) summarizes it better than I could. Anyway, Arcus was a big deal back then and apparently pushed sound quality higher, to the point that legendary German consumer electronic giant Grundig had their FineArts speakers built by Arcus.
Klaus Heinz eventually improved on the Air Motion Transformer driver developed by Oscar Heil. The AMT as we know it today, was developed by Klaus, which he introduced with his new company A.R.E.S.. ARES got swallowed by ELAC, who are still famous for the AMT today.
I guess all those milestones were dwarfed by the success Klaus Heinz achieved as founder of ADAM Audio, yet a series of unfortunate events had him exit his own company shortly before it was purchased by Focusrite.
And here he is now, his sixth defining adventure, at HEDD Audio. Even at over 75 years old, he is as motivated as ever – truly inspiring!
BTW, what makes him so special? He is a very talented musician. Here you can see him play on his Fazioli F308. He told me that he keeps on chasing the dynamics that a piano can create, which speakers still fail to reproduce even today. But what makes this even more interesting, is the fact that he is born as a son to the Noble prize winning Ernst Ruska – a genius in physics.
It was my absolute honour working for him.