Longtime Peterborough high-tech audio electronics company Bryston Limited been purchased and the bulk of its manufacturing will be relocating to the Huntsville area.
For more than 40 years, Bryston has designed and manufactured specialty electronics such as speakers, amplifiers, analog converters and more for consumers and professionals.
On Tuesday, company vice-president James Tanner in partnership with Colquhoun/Axiom Audio, based in Dwight, Ont., 20 kilometres east of Huntsville, announced they had acquired Bryston.
Tanner is now Bryston’s CEO, replacing Chris Russell whose family founded Bryston. Russell is retiring but will remain as a consultant, the company said.
Tanner, who joined Bryston in 1976, tells Global News Peterborough that due to increased sales, plans are to relocate most of the manufacturing at Bryston’s Neal Drive location to their larger facility in Dwight, about two hours north of Peterborough.
“We assume most of the manufacturing will be migrated to the Dwight factory over the next year or so but that depends a lot on sales,” said Tanner.
Tanner says they will maintain the research and development facility in Peterborough, which will accommodate a laboratory, offices and workstations for sales, engineering and repair, with Dwight handling the manufacturing.
“The merging of Bryston and Axiom will allow us to offer a much broader range of products, provide more in-house manufacturing facilities, and employ more people in Ontario,” he said.
Tanner says there are currently 27 employees in Peterborough and 12 of those positions will remain at the research and development facility in the city.
“Some production employees will be making the move to Dwight,” he said. “For those who are not able to relocate we will be assisted in finding new employment in Peterborough.”
Tanner aims to add new services, such as an online portal for order processing and referral services, an expanded sales team, a customer service hotline and expanded and modernized research and development at the Peterborough facility.
‘There are very few high-performance audio brands that offer the 40-plus year legacy of best-in-class products and award-winning services that Bryston does — and we are committed to providing our worldwide network of dealers with the tools they need to be even more successful,” Tanner stated in a company release.
“I am very excited about the next generation of Bryston products, beginning with the new BR-20 preamplifier scheduled to start shipping this month, as well as several stellar designs currently in development.