Poul Rossing
The Gato Audio company web page names Poul Rossing as the main person there. However it is worth to notice that Poul owns ¼ of the company and is chair of the board. He adds 50 years of business acumen and knowledge of the hifi industry to Gato Audio, but the company is run by managing director Frederik and creative director Kresten. In the 50-ties he started to work in his father’s workshop, soon he became the distributor of major audio companies. In 1973 he decided to design and manufacture his own loudspeakers under the brand name Avance. This was the first company, which profited from cooperation with the Chinese. Due to certain events the brand Avance was sold to the Chinese coworkers of Rossing, and they take care of it now. A part of the sales agreement was the design of a few more loudspeaker lines, where Poul was helped by the engineer Milad Kahfizadeh.
The second person responsible for Gato Audio is Frederik Johansen. Frederik and Kresten met for the first time in the company Holfi (review of the CD player Xenia HERE), where Frederik took care of production and logistics. In the year 2001 Johansen was employed by another Scandinavian manufacturer – Thule, making amplifiers under its own brand name, as well as in OEM setting. Their amplifiers were branded as Avance, but also TEAC (for example TEAC A-BX10). But as it turned out, this was for him just another step to get experience. In 2003, when GamuT – another Scandinavian manufacturer – had its worst times, Poul Rossing bought the company, and together with Milad Kahfizadeh sanitized it, founding the company GamuT International A/S. Both gentlemen were renowned loudspeaker specialists. GamuT on the other hand, was regarded mostly as an electronics company. To take care of that, they asked headhunters to recruit someone, who would be the head of the electronics department. This guy turned out to be Frederik Johansen, who left Thule Audio for GamuT, where he started to work in 2004. Together with the designer Kresten Dinesen they are regarded as responsible for the renaissance of GamuT. Dduring the time from 2003 to 2006 Gamut was transformed into a healthy company with full product line and established distribution network. There were no crisis in the company when Poul sold it.Poul Rossing could finally get retired.
In 2007, not far from Copenhagen, in Lyskær, Herlev something happened, that changed those plans. Frderik Johansen and Kresten Dinesen joined with Rasmus Holm and founded a completely new company, Gato Audio, and in 2009 Poul joined them as the co-owner and chairman of the board. Please note, that in the team the veterans of Scandinavian audio not only engineers can be found, but also a designer. One look at the tested AMP-150 is enough to see, that he had a large influence on the final product, and that the company did not look much at the costs. It had to be an amplifier that sounds well and looks well. Mission accomplished! Milad is an incredible acoustical engineer that helped voicing in the speakers, but as with all other Gato Audio products the making of our speakers is a team effort of the Gato Audio development team, as the old friend of Frederik from the GamuT times, Milad Kahfizadeh, who worked for some time as the head of application and engineer in Tymphany (Vifa, Peerless and Scan-Speak), from where he joined Gato Audio development team. The tested amplifier AMP-150 is a team effort of the Gato Audio development team. It looks just brilliantly – rounded edges, wooden additions, milky white display and splendid remote controller – just to name a few items. Despite the small enclosure, the power of the amplifier is quite high – it is 150W at 8Ω and 250W at 4Ω. The amplifier has untypical descriptions of the inputs, which are explained on the back plate. It is equipped well, it has RCA and XLR preamplifier outputs, similar inputs, and one of those inputs can be placed in unity gain mode for usage in home cinema systems. One feature is interesting. This function is called heat. It is used to bring the output transistors quickly to their operating temperature. Usually this takes about two hours, after which the currents and voltages stabilize, and distortion settles on the preset level. To accelerate this process, after pressing the button, the amplifier runs high current through the power transistors, which heats them up quickly. The whole procedure takes then about 10-15 minutes instead of two hours. A heaven for audiophiles, the obsessive-compulsive type…
Kresten Dinesen says: “If it is possible, I’d like to add a few more lines to who we are and how we work: Frederik and I runs Gato Audio. Frederik as managing director and me as creative director. After we founded the company Poul Rossing offered his assistance and he now owns 1/4 of the company and is chairman of the board. We profit from his 50 years of experience of business acumen and knowledge of the hifi industry. All our products are the result of a complete team effort. None of our products are developed or made by a single person. The Gato Audio developement team is a group of very wide spectrum of expert knowledge. Everything from hardware and software engineers, industrial designers to musicians and audio specialists.”
Teknologi og produkter
