News

Analogplanet Visits Audio-Technica Headquarters, Machida, Japan

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 15, 2016

Analogplanet recently visited Audio-Technica’s new Machida, Japan headquarters opened in 2015 to learn more about the fifty four year old company founded by the late Hideo Matsushita, and today run by his son company President Kazuo.

The company’s first two products were the AT-1 and AT-3 moving magnet cartridges. Six years later Audio-Technica began researching and developing high quality headphones, which it began marketing and distributing in 1974.

A-T soon added professional and consumer grade microphones to its product range and in the mid 1980s it commercialized Pure Copper by Ohno Continuous Casting (PCOCC) copper by using it for phono cartridge coils.

Despite the “near death” of vinyl LPs, Audio-Technica continues to manufacture a full line of phono cartridges while expanding its product line of headphones, microphones, food machinery and other products. Audio-Technica has provided microphones for many Olympic Games and will do so again for the 2016 games in Rio.

Today half of the company’s business is in headphones (the best selling brand in Japan for the past seven years), approximately twenty five percent is in microphones, while the rest covers AV accessories, mixers/amps and speakers, food processing equipment, dust prevention gear for industrial use, semiconductor lasers and optical pickups and of course, phono cartridges, most of which are manufactured in Audio-Technica’s Fukui, Japan factory.

The new headquarters shown in this video, is the home of the company’s research and development laboratories including anechoic and RF chambers.

It also houses part of founder Hideo Matsushita’s extensive collection of antique acoustic phonographs as well as part of his collection of art including works of Picasso and other well-known artists.

Manufacturing of microphones and other products is done at a Machida factory, which is also where Audio-Technica’s new ART 1000 cartridge is manufactured.

COMMENTS
Wimbo's picture
Submitted by Wimbo on Sat, 2016-07-16 00:09

I had numerous AT cartridges through the 80's and 90's.
ATF3,5,OC7,9,140ML etc.
I'm running an AT95VL at the moment. Always loved their style.

Jim Tavegia's picture
Submitted by Jim Tavegia on Sat, 2016-07-16 04:37

in being at both sides of the business from the recording end of making music and then in the playback side of phono cartridges, headphones, but I'm surprise that that do not have more of a presence in the phono preamp market, but that could change.

OldschoolE's picture
Submitted by OldschoolE on Sat, 2016-07-16 20:15

Your so lucky Michael, getting to visit these neat places. Thank you for the great video too so the rest of us can visit vicariously. It’s good to see Audio Technica back in the game full force. They never really left though.
I’ve known about their pro mics and such for a while. They also make mics specifically for pro video cameras.
As for carts, one can hardly go wrong with their phono carts in my opinion. The AT95E is a fantastic starter cart that will get things rolling nicely. Then the steps up from that are worth their price points and it still doesn’t take a lot. I went from the AT95E to the AT120 E/T and it was just $50 more with an improvement of nearly double the AT95E.
I won’t be trying their new uber-expensive cart anytime now or in future, but their other carts fit the bill nicely.
(At carts are not the only ones I run,by the way).

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