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. |
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