WHAT’S IN A NAME?

DALI says its name is an acronym for Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries. So it must be true. But it wasn’t always so. Long before current CEO Lars Worre became a major shareholder in the company, the letters stood for Danish American Loudspeaker Industries.

That earlier acronym was coined by the company’s founder and still majority shareholder Peter Lyngdorf, who has also founded and/or owned many other famous hi-fi companies including NAD, TacT

Audio, Steinway-Lyngdorf, Snell Acoustics, Gryphon, and Soundbox. He also founded (and still owns) a chain of hi-fi stores called HiFi Klubben which has outlets in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands.

DALI was originally founded in 1983 to manufacture US-designed Cerwin-Vega loudspeakers for sale to Lyngdorf’s HiFi Klubben stores as well as to other retailers in the UK and throughout Europe. Due to customs tariff controls in place at the time, plus the cost of freight, and a poor exchange rate against the US dollar, it was very expensive to import US-made Cerwin-Vega loudspeakers into Denmark and Europe.

DALI was founded to circumvent these costs by importing only the Cerwin-Vega drivers and crossover networks (which did not attract a tariff, and were easier and cheaper to ship than complete speaker systems) which were then installed in cabinets built entirely in Denmark by DALI. This was initially a joint operation in partnership with Cerwin-Vega, hence the name Danish American Loudspeaker Industries. DALI only ceased manufacturing Cerwin-Vega speakers for Europe in 1999.

The Oberon 9 is not manufactured in Denmark, but in DALI’s own 5,500-square-metre factory in Ningbo, China, a factory it established in 2007 which not only makes completed speakers but also makes many of the parts used in the loudspeakers that the company does build in Denmark. Many DALI parts, including drivers, are also manufactured entirely in Denmark, in the company’s mammoth 22,000-square-metre factory in Nørager, just outside of Aarhus (on the east coast of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula).