History of Rodek

May 21, 2002

The history of Rodek Car Audio

I have an older Rodek 2150i amplifier in my car audio system having an output of 2x150wrms or 500wrms bridged into 4ohms. Pictured below:

Rodek 2300i pictured by arrow.

Rodek Electronics was originally started by a Mr. Richard Loewen in the US in 1990. As far as I remember the factory/offices were located in Bellingham, WA. Back in 1990 Mr. Loewen was close to retirement age.

The designer of the Rodek car audio amplifiers at that time was a Mr. Steven Mantz who runs his own company, ZED Audio which is apparently an OE contract manufacturer for other large companies such as JL Audio, Hifonics, Lanzar, etc. ZED AUDIO is alive and well, in California.

Steven Mantz also did amplifier development and design in the early 90's for Hifonics, Crunch, Autotek (current mean machine series I believe) and Rodek car audio amplifiers. Back in those days he was very popular and somewhat famous in Europe, especially Germany. There were a few car audio/hifi magazines at the time who Steven apparently developed test criteria for testing various car audio equipment.

Hifonics "X" Series was designed by him, the circuit boards bear his "ZED AUDIO" name. After that he designed amplifiers for ESX which were only available in the USA in 1998. ESX are now marketed by www.audiodesign.de (a Hifonics company). These amps are now made by Calcell in Korea but still have the "ZED AUDIO" marking on the circuit boards.

Mr. Mantz also did design work for Planet Audio as well as the last Lanzar Optidrive Series (not the Opti SL). He also did some design work for Hollywood Sound amplifiers.

ACR Products in Switzerland imported Rodek products for sale in Switzerland and Germany through a Mr. Eli Gusavac who now apparently works for Soundstorm in the US.

Their last known US address was:

Rodek
125 Old Moroe Rd.
Bogart, GA 30622
Phone: (706) 369-9519

They were also seen at:

12300 Edison Way, Garden Grove, CA 92841

In apprx. 1995 Rodek USA went bankrupt because of bad business decisions and bad business politics.

The tradename RODEK was bought by the company Bostwick who produced a few of their products. But for many years now there has been no activity under the Rodek brand in N. America. Bostwick at the moment only sells products under it's own tradename.

ACR Products in Switzerland bought the tradename Rodek for the European market (not N. America) from a Belgium company named Rodec in 1997. The Rodec company had bought the Rodek tradename previous to that. The Rodec company sells audio mixing boards and other such unrelated products.

Rodek Europe has nothing in common anymore with what Rodek USA used to be. Now it's just the Rodek image and logo.

ACR Rodek has a new line of amplifiers coming out April 2002 and the designer of those models is Andre Grossenbacher who has kindly helped me with the history search of the Rodek brand history. They will be shown at www.rodek.com in April.

Also thank you to A. Kinnen from Germany who filled in some of the details on Stephen Mantz's design history.

I've had some email correspondence with Steven and found more information about his history in car audio. You can view his car audio story here. If you have a problem with an older Rodek amplifier you're best to probably contact Steven directly. He may still have schematics to repair them.

That's all I know for now!