Who We Are

Introduction

Inouye Audio Concepts Corporation (formerly, Inouye Enterprises Ltd., 1976) is a privately-held corporation, incorporated under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) in Canada, February 12, 2001.

Brian J. Inouye is the President and founder of Inouye Audio Concepts Corporation ("IAC") and has taken the lead in several product development projects for the private sector, government agencies, and the military. Brian has more than 35-years experience, in electronic research and development, and business management, and is equally at ease with new and emerging developments in technology and product development, as he is with the ever-changing shifts in global-marketplace economies.

As a published author of several lifestyle magazine articles, Brian provides the company with an efficient and effective communication skill-set that is sensitive to ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural differences.

Company Present & Future

IAC is presently involved in research and development into a variety of technologies, including our continuing efforts to further develop one of our core technologies, AC-mains power-line conditioning. Regarding power-line conditioning, a continuous effort is necessary to keep abreast of the challenges presented by the ever-changing technological and marketplace demands, to provide the most advanced, and value-engineered solutions to the problems with electrical power.

For example, with the constant growth in personal communication devices, radiated electromagnetic energy from cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® and RFIDs, to name a few, increases the conducted electromagnetic noise that compromises the integrity of our electrical power.

Additionally, Brian currently consults on behalf of other companies on matters relating to business and product development, but his primary responsibility is to identify and incubate core technologies specific to the benefit of IAC.

Company History (back two decades)

In 1984 Brian developed a technology that spawned a number of products, starting with a limited production of a laboratory-use-only power-line conditioner. After a few years of product development, the first commercial application of this technology produced a portable, dual section, power-line conditioner, known as the Synergistic Power Line Conditioner™ ("SPLC").

The SPLC was a design-specific product for high-end audio and video applications. Its function was to provide a clean AC-mains power source by way of suppressing radio-frequency interference (RFI), electromagnetic interference (EMI), current harmonics caused by diode rectification, spurious voltage and current transients, and to automatically disconnect itself from the AC-mains power source, in the event of a power-line fault that exceeded the SPLC's maximum energy-dissipation capacity.

The SPLC has earned over a dozen rave reviews from professional and trade publications alike, across North America. From the time of its introduction, the SPLC was considered a technological breakthrough product in terms of performance and reliability, and since, has boasted a product lifecycle, as a mature product, for over 20-years—remaining in production until 2005.

Company History (back four decades)

Early in 1972, Brian experimented with a transistor power amplifier design, using germanium transistors. At this time, for the most part, the consumer-electronics industry had embraced the silicon transistor as the go-to semiconductor. However, Brian found that the euphoric sound of germanium transistors was much preferred over the sound of the newer silicon transistors.

Brian introduced his first commercial power amplifier in 1976, the same year the original company, Inouye Enterprises Limited, was founded.

This power amplifier earned Brian an excellent reputation, for producing musical sounding amplifiers that rivaled the vacuum tube (valve) counterparts of the day. This unique amplifier employed a “quasi-complementary symmetry” output stage, mainly due to the lack of “true complementary” germanium power transistors available at that time (at the very least, complementary devices were very hard to match). Additionally, this configuration permitted a transformer-less and capacitor-less output stage that utilized transistors of the same polarity (all NPN devices), eliminating the need for complementary transistors.

Ironically, years later, Brian determined that much of his musical attraction to the germanium transistor output stage was its inherently lower crossover distortion, due primarily to its ease of biasing (almost one-third the base-emitter voltage for a germanium transistor compared to a silicon transistor); and, its inherently lower gain, which required far less global feedback.

This started a 10-year journey to develop a silicon-based bipolar transistor output stage for a solid-state power amplifier that mirrored the liquidity and euphoric midrange quality of a class-A biased germanium transistor design, and that would significantly challenge the affection bestowed upon the vacuum tube (valve)-based power amplifier. To that end, the first in the series, the MPA-200 (200-W RMS) mono-block power amplifier was introduced in 1986.