Audio-Technica

Audio-Technica Corporation (株式会社オーディオテクニカ) is a Japanese maker of phonograph cartridges, headphones and microphones, established on 17 April 1962 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Its founder Hideo Matsushita (松下秀雄, 1919-2013) had spent the previous years at the Bridgestone Museum of Art, where he ran record-appreciation concerts drawing on the museum’s collection - that work fed directly into the decision to build cartridges of his own. The company opened with one million yen of capital and two products, the AT-1 and AT-3 MM stereo cartridges. In 1965 it moved its head office to the Machida district of Tokyo, where the company is based. Early business was almost entirely OEM supply to Japanese turntable makers; in 1972 Audio-Technica opened a US arm in Fairlawn, Ohio, and began shipping VM cartridges to European builders from there. The brand continues to trade as a privately held kabushiki kaisha.

The company’s first proprietary patent, in 1967, covered a VM (Vibrating Magnet) cartridge whose uniquely shaped magnet sidestepped the licensing fees Western patent-holders charged on standard MM designs. VM became the bench-mark of the house style for decades. The 1977 line introduced the AT-15Sa at ¥25,000, a VM with a Shibata stylus for CD-4 quadrophonic playback out to 45 kHz, and the AT-34, Audio-Technica’s first MC cartridge with the Dual Moving Coil (デュアル・ムービングコイル) layout that gave each channel its own coil instead of a shared one. The 1983 flagship AT1000MC pushed that further at ¥200,000: a 0.06 mg rectangular natural-diamond stylus on a beryllium cantilever, an aluminium-billet body with anodised alumite finish, paired with the AT1000T toroidal step-up transformer reading from 5 Hz to 80 kHz. The same year brought the AT666, a vacuum-pump disc stabiliser whose 1.4 kg platter clamped the record under 250 kg/m² of suction.

Headphones followed in 1974 with the AT-700 line; microphones in 1978 with the AT-800 line. When CD reached the market in 1982, cartridge demand collapsed and these two newer products grew into the main catalogue. The early-1980s headphone flagship was the bipolar electret-condenser ATH-8 at ¥34,000; by AT Total Catalog Vol. 4 of April 1989 it sat alongside the ATH-M9 studio monitor, the PC-OCC monocrystal-copper ATH-900 series and the ATW-1032a (¥100,000), a VHF wireless system with space-diversity antennas. By that 1989 catalogue the phono section ran from the AT-ART1 MC flagship at ¥68,000 down to the AT-ML180/OCC VM, with AT1501IV and AT1503IV tonearms paired with the AT800T/OCC monocrystal-copper MC transformer. By April 1993 a sixth category had appeared - the MZ, CX, KZ, KX, K and Va furniture lines of AV racks and television stands.