Theory Audio Design is a relatively new company, but comes from solid stock, having emerged in 2018 as a sister brand alongside a marque of nearly two decades standing: Pro Audio Technology. Both share their President/Product Designer Paul Hales and hail from Orange County, California, where the two brands cohabit a swish ‘Lake Forest Experience Center’. They share distribution in Australia as well, under Audio Active.
The two brands have different goals. Pro Audio Technology brings professional-level cinema sound to high-end residential home theatre. Its founder Paul Hales already had a track record with Hales Audio in high-end two-channel speakers before working with pro audio company QSC from 2000 to 2004, assisting that company’s highly successful move from pro amplifiers into loudspeakers. But at the same time Hales was running his own demonstrations of a new ‘cinema reference’ speaker from Hales Audio, and that led him towards the founding of Pro Audio Technology, making “professional-style speakers but with residential installed sound in mind”, as he says. It is indeed serious gear for high-end dedicated home cinemas; the speakers use compression drivers and are typically very large in the woofer department. You won’t find no soundbars in the ranges of Pro Audio Technology, no sir.
The newer sister company i heory Audio Design, on the other hand, was founded to take the technology developed for ‘Pro’ and use it in more affordable equipment for media rooms, distributed audio systems, and outdoor use. “The products take a more lifestyle approach because they were designed to be seen,” Paul Hales told us, even though in this demonstration the Theory gear was installed in a theatre room behind an acoustic screen. And here
