Acoupower was founded in 2003 by a man who has been obsessed with producing the finest quality acoustical devices he can for more than 25 years.

In 1979, some guy at the local Radio Shack told a 13 year old Carlos Beltran he could build a pair of speakers that would be better than what he could buy for the same money.   Mr. Beltran immediately became a student of electro-acoustics, and has been designing speakers ever since.   While still 13, he designed his first system, with intended -3dB points of 20Hz and 20kHz.   Before completing high school, he had designed several home systems for friends, and a special high output enclosure to use with the High School's film projectors.   The small high efficiency sealed box design was an instant favorite among the faculty and students alike - you could actually understand what was being said in the films.

Mr. Beltran spent five years studying physics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.   There, the professors drilled home the core principles of waves and energy into Mr. Beltran's mind until his mind almost exploded.   Interestingly, these are the very principles at work in any type of acoustic transducer.   While at school, Mr. Beltran negotiated his way into using one of the best anechoic chambers in the world.   He had always wanted to test his original speakers and see if they met his design goal set at the age of 13.   They did.   Actual -3db points of 20Hz and just above 20kHz.   Also during his college years, Mr. Beltran spent a summer at Bose Corp.  where he learned a great deal from many excellent professionals.

In 1990, Mr. Beltran began his professional career at Oxford Speaker Company in Chicago.   He spent more than three years at Oxford, working on acoustic transducers for Home Audio, Pro Audio, Musical Instrument applications, Active Noise Control, and even Harley Davidson Motorcycles.   His very first production driver would set the tone for his career- exceeding the customer's expectations in every area.   This driver was a 10" guitar speaker for Fender MI.   In the early 60's, Oxford manufactured the 10" speakers used in the legendary "Vibroverb" guitar amp (Oxford's # 10K5F-1).   In 1990, Fender decided it was time to re-introduce this classic and called up Oxford to ask for help in making the speakers once again.   This was not only to prove an engineering challenge, as some of the original parts and materials were simply unavailable, but it also served as an important history lesson regarding the loudspeaker industry.   When it was all said and done, Fender not only got the old driver's legendary signature sound, but also ended up with 5 times the power handling they needed.   Over the next three years, not even one of the thousands of 10K5F-1's manufactured was returned because it couldn't take what the amp dished out.   Failure was simply not an option that Mr. Beltran would allow in any of the design decisions.

Another important experience for Mr. Beltran while at Oxford was his work in Active Noise Control.   Active Noise Control was a big deal in the early 90's, with lots of money at stake in several multimillion dollar experiments taking place around the world.   Mr. Beltran worked not only in the R&D stage of a few major projects, but also designed production drivers used to lower the sound of several electric power generators.   These production drivers were first used in Southern California Edison's Redondo Beach Generating facility, and were mated to a special enclosure, also designed by Mr. Beltran.   The combination of driver and enclosure yielded an electro-acoustic efficiency of approximately 20%.   Twenty four of each of these "Cancel Sources" was used in each of the generators in which the systems were installed.   Mr. Beltran worked extensively with PHD Statisticians to insure a one year probability of failure of less than 0.1%.   These generators have a very simple, but totally brutal duty cycle- 11 months ON, 1 month OFF for maintenance... and then repeat the cycle.   The original plan had been to replace the drivers once a year.   A few years after having moved on from Oxford Speaker Company, he inquired as to how his systems had performed.   He was told that three maintenance periods had gone by, and not a single of the 72 drivers had needed to be replaced.   That's 72 drivers at 33 months of operation (or more than 1.7 MILLION hours of operation) without a single failure.   Sounds expensive? No, not when you make the right decisions ahead of time.   The cost of goods on those drives was a mere $17.50.   Mr. Beltran has never believed in throwing money at features or gimmicks- just exceed the expectations of your customers, and they will come back.

In 1993, Mr. Beltran decided he wanted to diversify his career in electro-acoustics, and joined Federal Signal Corporation.   This was to be an enormous challenge, as everything he previously thought was "the ultimate" goal from his audio work, proved to be no more than a joke when placed next to the goals required for signaling.   For example, in the Profession Audio Industry, system manufacturers brag about being able to generate SPL's in the 120's at 10 feet.   The outdoor warning sirens Mr. Beltran worked on produced up to 127dB...  at 100 feet.   That's 20dB, or 100 times the SPL.

The culmination of Mr. Beltran's work in the signaling industry came in the form of a 30 Acoustic watt generator in the 1 kHz region that you could hold in the palm of your hand.   This speaker single handedly revolutionized the emergency vehicle signal market overnight- doubling the acoustic power density in the industry in a single step.   Needless to say, this technology is patented.   This one speaker provides Federal Signal Corporation with approximately $7,000,000.00 in sales per year.   Mr. Beltran also gets a kick out of the fact that Federal Signal carried his original R&D designation for the project into the final finished goods designation- MS100.   It was his shorthand for a 100W Mini Speaker.

In 1996, Mr. Beltran left Federal Signal to pursue consulting work.   During this time, he worked on several different projects, ranging from personal amplification devices to back-up alarms, to subwoofer designs.   Mr. Beltran also pushed the envelope in high end, complex electro-acoustic simulation; being the first person to perform a complete, two sided coupled field finite element analysis of a compression driver and horn.   This work was presented at an AES meeting in 1998.   His fondest memory of his consulting days is simply that all his customers came back to him and asked him to do more for them.   His primary goal of exceeding the customer's expectations had led to a 100% customer return rate.

In 1998, Mr. Beltran came back to his Boston area roots and joined Boston Acoustics.   During his four and a half years at Boston Acoustics, he developed the loudspeaker industry's first fully automated, comprehensive, and accurate response prediction software.   Some of the fruit of this work was presented at the AES meeting in September of 2000.   This work generated a lot of buzz in electro-acoustic engineering circles and challenged the industry to do more straightforward engineering, and less guesswork when designing speakers.   This software and other proprietary contributions to Boston's engineering capabilities were responsible for a dramatic reduction in man hours required to design high quality drivers and were important factors which led to Mr. Beltran's Promotion at Boston Acoustics in 2002 to Advanced Acoustical Products Manager.

Mr. Beltran is currently responsible for all the details of the products currently under development at Acoupower.   He wants you to know, he has not forgotten his Fender MI, Active Noise Control, and Consulting days.   Acoupower's products will exceed your expectations.   Like his customer's in the past, he is confident you will come back for more.