The Comeback Kid Returns

EVERYBODY LOVES a great comeback story.

- Michael Trei

Whether it’s Tiger Woods winning The Masters after a decade of disappointment, or Apple’s return to global dominance after nearly going bust twenty years back, it’s nice when someone or something can make a strong return.

Let’s add Rodgersound Labs (RSL) to the comeback list. Founded by Howard Rodgers nearly fifty years ago, the Rodgersound Labs brand started life as a small Southern California chain of audio shops, with a house line of speakers that were built in the back of the original store and sold exclusively through the chain. While Rodgers himself preferred the more refined “East Coast sound” of speakers like the Acoustic Research AR3, with RSL he came up with different flavors of speaker to cater to all tastes, including the more dynamic and aggressive “West Coast sound” of brands like JBL and Altec Lansing. With the main store located near recording studios around Hollywood, audio professionals would often find their way in to check things out. Rodgers was surprised to discover that these audio pros often preferred the more dynamic and raw-sounding West Coast sound speakers over his more refined models and was soon supplying many local studios with speakers to use as monitors.

Over the next twenty years, RSL continued to grow, and by the late 1980s it had eight stores. But as so often happens, Howard Rodgers became entangled in running the business end of things and was no longer able to follow his passion for designing and building new speakers. After retiring, he sold RSL to a private equity group. Unfortunately, that group didn’t know much about the audio business, and within three years the company had gone bankrupt. When Rodgers discovered that a cheap “white van” speaker company had plans to buy up the RSL name, he went to the liquidation auction to purchase the rights rather than see a brand with his name on it sink to that level.