John Strabler writes ...
Australian R&D company based in Sidney, New South Wales and originally founded in 1991 by Brian Conolly and David McGrathas as Lake DSP but changed its name to Lake Technology in 1999. The company originally supplied research and experimental tools based on technology from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization that had been developed initially for use in radio astronomy and involved impulse and convolution technology that was at the time little known in the audio industry.
The company did in the following years develop the Huron a modular multi-channel signal processing platform that was marketed towards sectors such as acoustic research, acoustic environment simulation and game development and it was from that product that the company developed what was to become Dolby Headphone (Now called Dolby Virtual Speaker) that for a time looked like it would become huge but turned out to be a short lived fad, by the turn of the century the company was making available a number of professional audio products both hardware and software including some unusual products such as audio convolution research systems and sold all kinds of development software and plugins much of them actually bought in from third parties, but also some hardware products.
By 2005 all of the research and most licensing operations had been dropped and the company had instead focused on marketing their technologies into the installation and sound reinforcement fields and they introduced audio distribution and signal processing products that featured more advanced correction and analysis capabilities than had been available to that market segment previously. Lake technology was taken over by Dolby Laboratories in 2006 mostly to gain access to the patent portfolio of that Lake had amassed and to singal processing technology that was ahead of anything they had developed in-house, the sound reinforcement product line and lake trademark was then sold to LAB Gruppen in 2009.
