It was spring of 2011 when 25-year-old industrial design student Tuukka Kingelin decided to organize a meeting. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss setting up a company. This company, later called
Uploud Audio, would commercialize Kingelin’s long time hobby – loudspeaker designing and manufacturing.

Later the team applied for Aalto Entrepreneurship Society’s Summer of Startups 2011 (http://aaltoes.com/summer-of-startups/), which was an intensive 10-week programme targeted for early stage startups during the summer of 2011. From this programme Uploud Audio team got, for example, some valuable feedback for its development and growth.

So in a nutshell, Uploud Audio does good sounding and looking hi-fi loudspeakers for ordinary people. Unlike tech savvy gold ears that are seen the main consumers of hi-fi nowadays, ordinary people think at least twice what kind of stuff they are willing to keep in their living rooms, for example.

The team behind Uploud Audio consists mainly of three people. In addition to Tuukka Kingelin, there are Aku-Ville Lehtimäki and Lassi Laitinen – a business undergraduate and a marketing oriented social psychology undergraduate in this respect. There are also a bunch of hi-fi enthusiasts and professionals helping out the core team to produce loudspeakers that actually sound good enough.

For tech savvy readers, it can be revealed that all the model have SEAS 7” coaxial element ( http://www.seas.no/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=119&Itemid=141 ) while the boxes themselves are made out of integral urethane.

The future of Uploud Audio looks promising. For example, in Finland there are a handful of hi-fi manufacturers, but they all more or less rely on rather on technical specifications than the design aspect. Globally, the design hi-fi is usually quite expensive and therefore average people cannot or are not willing to afford it.

Check out prototypes and concepts from Uploud Audio at: http://www.uploud.fi