History


While just a teenager, Charles Grecco became fascinated with sound reinforcement. Wanting to understand the physics of loudspeakers, Grecco purchased The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, by legendary loudspeaker designer and author Vance Dickason and began building speakers as a hobby as well as engineering sound in his father’s church in Northern California in the late 1970’s.

Soon afterwards, Grecco became front of house engineer for Dino Kartsonakis, one of Christian music’s greatest pianists. After several years of being on the road, Grecco found himself less than satisfied with the quality of loudspeakers he was being forced to use in churches around the country. He took speaker building more seriously. He looked at the tools of the trade, and began purchasing the necessary computers, software (LEAP, LMS and TEF) and wood working equipment needed to take his hobby to a whole new level. The only problem was, he was not able to just leave the road and go back to school to study loudspeaker design. Therefore, he had to teach himself.

He began to hire the people behind the tools (i.e. the software designers, hardware designers, amplifier designers, CD horn designers, transducer designers and box experts) to teach him this trade called loudspeaker design. Soon this “on the fly training” paid off as he began using his newly designed speakers
on the road touring with his clients.

This led Grecco to launch Sterling Group Audio (SGA) as an avenue to design custom loudspeakers for touring and installed sound. In the mid 1990’s, SGA completed its first installation of custom digital self-powered speaker. Not only was this a milestone for SGA but it also established Grecco as one of the first speaker designers to integrate full range high power Class-D amplifiers directly into the speaker box for pro audio use. At that time, no other speaker manufacturer was using digital amplifiers in their boxes as you see today. Those SGA prototypes have been working non-stop for over 10 years.

Over the years Grecco used SGA to continue his pursuit of excellence in speaker design. Keeping in line with his philosophy of involving great people, Since its conception, SGA has enlisted over 30 of the best minds in the audio business to work on their products. Grecco has been able to assemble a team which continues to break new ground in sound reinforcement including creating one of the first multi-stereo loudspeaker installations, one of the first 5.1 surround sound rooms for live sound reinforcement and possibly the first ever ribbon based, Class-D self-powered line array system.