In 1971, the brothers were running a company known as “Klark Equipment”, producing garage forecourt equipment: vending style vacuum cleaners, space heaters and other similar products. Phillip was the entrepreneur having previously run a clothing business in Australia. Terry was the engineer: he had worked for Decca and was also an active local musician. With this background, the company soon branched into professional audio, at first upgrading and customising Decca multi-track tape recorders and later producing a very high quality ¼ inch 2-track tape machine of their own, the SM2. This tape machine was sold to the BBC and independent broadcasting companies under the brand name “Teknik”. Terry also started to develop signal processing hardware including compressor/limiters and small graphic equalisers. These were produced in very low quantities and sold to recording studios to complement the relatively simple audio mixing console of the day. The graphic equalisers developed during 1973 onwards were called Teknik 7S and 9S, with seven and nine bands respectively, plus a stereo 11+11S with eleven bands of EQ.
Klark Teknik
In 1974 the brand name “Klark Teknik” came into being. 1976 saw the first KT product produced in real volume, the DN27. Approximately 6500 units shipped between 1977 and 1985. In 1980 the company moved to its current purpose built premises at Walter Nash Road, Kidderminster. Up until this point the business had been run out of an old Nissen hut in a back corner of the Summerfield MOD solid fuel rocket motor factory with only 15 employees. Klark Teknik PLC was formed in 1985. In the following year Klark Teknik acquired the Hounslow-based studio mixing company DDA and subsequently moved the manufacturing to Kidderminster. The company further diversified by developing active studio monitors under the brand “Klark Acoustic”, winning a Queen's Award for export. It also launched the DN772, a seven-second profanity delay with innovative time re-setting technology without pitch shifting artefacts, which featured in the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
Subsequent mergers
Klark Teknik purchased Midas Audio Systems Ltd in 1987. In 1992, the Clarke brothers sold Klark Teknik Group to Mark IV Audio. Terry Clarke went on to set up MC2 Audio Ltd with co-founder Ian McCarthy in 1994, producing high quality power amplifiers for the commercial market. Mark IV Audio sold both their holdings of EVI Audio and Telex Communications to venture capitalists Greenwich Street Partners in 1998, merging them into a single corporation called Telex Communications. On 1 September 2006 Greenwich sold Telex Communications to the Bosch group. In December 2009, Midas and Klark Teknik were acquired by Music Group, a holding company chaired by Uli Behringer, which also owns other audio companies such as Behringer and Bugera as well as Electronic Manufacturing Services company Eurotec.
