Reposted without permission from classicspeakerpages.net but with the specific intention of preserving this history within AudioKarma! For this I hope I am forgiven!
From Bob Hazelwood
"Perhaps I can shed a little light on your whatever happened to a/d/s/ curiosity. I was employed by a/d/s on two occasions. The first from 1983 - 1993, then from 1996 - 1999, so was in a position to see some of the changes that resulted in the eventual downfall of a/d/s/ as a popular audio brand.
a/d/s/ founder, Dr. Godehard Guenther, is a brilliant man who was always a little ahead of the market when it came to product ideas. in the late 70's through early '80's a/d/s/ speaker sales were doing startlingly well in both home and automotive categories, but Godehard felt that people would begin to appreciate the benefits of purchasing complete, high quality integrated system solutions. This was quite common in Godehard's native Germany, but in the US we had a mix and match mentality. This thinking resulted in a/d/s/ purchasing the Braun electronics division from then owner, Gillette. The plan was the Braun Atelier electronics were to become a/d/s/ Atelier. This turned out to be an extremely ambitious project because the plans were in place for the complete electronics line, but only a few of the new models were fully developed at the time. The additional personnel and costs to tool and develop the line were phenomenal. The development of many of the products, such as the flagship R4 receiver would be simple today but extremely difficult back then. In the late 80's the building-blocks didn't exist to make a computerized digital receiver with full system control and multi-room capability like we take for granted today. Now there are chips for virtually everything, but a/d/s/ needed to develop everything from scratch. While speaker sales were still going strong, and the automotive division was doing great under the leadership of industry leaders John Bishop and John Caldwell, the costs of this expansion into home electronics were taking their toll.
The M and CM series speakers designed by Dana Hathaway, were introduced at this time also. They represented a departure from the original a/d/s/ sound but were quite good and arguably were objectively "better" in all technical aspects. They continued to be extremely well reviewed, but since the lion's share of the marketing resources were directed towards Atelier the M-series didn't get the same focus as the earlier products, so they aren't as well known today. Just after this, a/d/s/ became involved with a start-up company that had a great concept called Frox. The Frox products were the forerunners of today's Media Center PC's, foreshadowing all of the media integration and home automation we now take for granted. The difficulty was that this system was envisioned when PC's had 286 processors and 512K of RAM, so this was also not a simple project. We have quad-core processors and multiple gigs of RAM to do that today. The plan was for a/d/s/ to provide the powered 5.1 speaker systems that connected digitally to the Frox controller through optical cable. The a/d/s/ speakers actually got built, but the Frox systems never got off the ground due to software and technical difficulties, resulting in disaster for the company. So a/d/s/ ended up stuck with a lot of unsellable inventory, and took a further financial hit. I'm skipping quite a bit, because there were some other plans and projects that didn't go as expected, such as the worlds first expandable 6-zone multi-room multi-source whole-house system controller with LCD control pads (in 1986!). All these things played a part watering down the company's ability to market their products effectively. Eventually, a/d/s/ sold Braun Electronics back to Gillette, and cleaned up after the other projects, but the damage was done. This all led to a need for a capital influx which led to a merger with Museatex from Canada, and the formation of ADS Technologies (ADST) as the holding company that had a/d/s/ and Museatex as their brands. In this era the company was run by Kurien Jacob, an audiophile and turnaround specialist who orchestrated the merger. Kurien integrated the Museatex and a/d/s/ operations. a/d/s/ benefitted by the addition of a superb audio engineer, Ed Meitner, to the group. a/d/s/ introduced some interesting and good performing products during this era, but with the exception of a few car speaker products none achieved the market traction of the earlier home speakers. Over the next few years, ADST acquired autosound manufacturers Orion, and Precision Power (PPI) along with ribbon speaker maker Apogee Acoustics. The a/d/s and Apogee factories were combined in Wilmington, MA, and later moved in with with Orion (and later PPI) into a new purpose-built facility in Tempe Arizona. I left soon after this to join Cambridge SoundWorks, so don't know much more about what went on inside the walls. I do know that at this time, the autosound side of the business was outperforming everything else, so the folks running the business apparently focused their efforts in that direction. The unfortunate fallout of this was that many of the excellent home products from a/d/s/, Apogee, and Museatex are no more. Ultimately, as has been mentioned elsewhere, ADST was purchased by Directed Electronics. At least to my eyes, it would appear that Directed doesn't seem to have much interest in continuing a/d/s/ as a high-technology value-added brand. It looks like a few of the holdover products may still exist, but the newer products carrying the brand logo appear to be generic turn-key products with nothing special to offer.
Godehard Guenther, on the other hand is still making some cool, innovative products under the Soundmatters brand. Although a different focus than the original a/d/s/, some of the Soundmatters products (especially the subwoofers) show some clearly different thinking that is definitely a Godehard Guenther trademark.
Bob"
