BRAND PROFILE RØDE
A mic for all seasons W
hen Henry Freedman, a Londoner resident in Sweden, and his wife, Astrid, were given the chance to
take the Dynacord brand to Australia in 1966, they leapt at it. Freedman, an electrical and sound engineer, had been designing intercoms during the day and fixing front-line PAs in the evening, while also holding on to the Dynacord business in Sweden. The opportunity to take a brand he understood inside out to virgin territory on the other side of the world was one not to be missed. The family, with son Peter in tow, established Freedman Electronics – the first pro audio company in Australia. When Henry passed away in 1987, Peter had been with the company for ten years (having grown up with electronics and sound equipment all around him) and felt more than qualified to take on his father’s business.
36 miPRO DECEMBER 2010 The late 80s and early 90s were, of course,
hard times, economically speaking, and Peter Freedman was looking around for ways of diversifying his company when he shrewdly observed the ADAT phenomenon that was beginning to spark the home recording market. “Freedman Electronics had marketed a line
Pelle Almqvist, lead singer for The Hives is an avid user of Røde microphones
of dynamic and electret condenser mics, so mic design wasn’t alien to me,” recalls Freedman. “I saw that, because of ADAT, there was the potential for volume sales of a low-cost recording mic. We brought in a small shipment from China, performed some modifications to make them more reliable and offered them for sale in Sydney. This was the birth of Røde.
“We were amazed at the demand and
started to think about the possibility of us becoming a serious mic company.” And there the story might have effectively ended and this article would be one of how an Australian designer successfully marketed a Chinese-made range of mics (and who knows what else) around the world. Freedman, however, wanted more control over the manufacturing process, so he looked into making the mics himself.
TAKING THE REIGNS “I realised we could achieve higher quality and an even better price if we controlled the
With a heritage in the audio and electronics businesses dating back 50 years, Røde was born out of the democratisation of the recording industry. Andy Barrett gets a glimpse of Peter Freedman’s crystal ball and sees quality for the people…
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