About Artisan Acoustics
Artisan Acoustics arrived in 2015 to bring SB Acoustics loudspeakers across South East Asia, started by two audiophiles who got tired of the audio industry’s markups. Whether you’re building, tweaking or just speaker-curious, come talk shop.
Artisan Acoustics burst onto the scene in 2015, on a mission to sprinkle the sonic magic of SB Acoustics speakers all across South East Asia—because every audiophile deserves epic sound without breaking the bank.
Our founders, two irreverent audiophiles who met when audiocassettes were still a thing, got tired of what a finished loudspeaker costs next to the parts inside it. So they started building their own.
Two decades of building later they are still at it, still convinced the next pair will be the last pair, and still wrong about that.
In 2015 a factory tour in Surabaya turned into an offer: buy the parts at cost, or take on the distributorship. They took the distributorship — for Singapore and East & West Malaysia, for SB Acoustics and later SB Audience too.
The plant belongs to Sinar Baja Electric. The drivers are drawn by Danesian Audio in Denmark, a design house formed by engineers out of Scan-Speak and now part of the same group. Baskets, voice coils, cones, crossovers and piano-gloss cabinets are all made on site.
So whether you are speaker-curious or three builds deep, get in touch. Tell us the room, the amplifier and the budget, and we will tell you which driver, kit or finished pair fits — including when the answer is the cheaper one.
The factory behind the brand
Worth being plain about the corporate shape, because it is unusual and it is the reason any of this matters. Sinar Baja Electric owns both brands. SB Acoustics and SB Audience are not customers of the factory and not licensees of a name — they are the group’s own marques, sitting alongside SB Automotive, and the plant that makes them is the plant that makes drivers for everyone else. When a Satori tweeter and a compression driver for a touring rig come off the same site, that is one company’s tooling and one company’s quality department, not a supply chain.
The plant our founders walked around in 2015 is Sinar Baja Electric, and it is a great deal larger than the hi-fi world tends to assume. audioXpress toured it and ran the piece under a headline that saves us the trouble of making the point ourselves: “Too Big to Be Kept a Secret”. What its editor found in Surabaya was a vertically integrated group — five sister companies across six facilities — producing around eight million drivers a year in 2016, with the capacity in place for ten million or more.
Vertical integration is the part that matters if you build speakers. Voice coils, steel chassis and metal parts, cones and spiders, the tool, die, mould and jig workshop, the woodworking and the finishing all happen inside the group. The drawing and the finished driver stay under one roof, which is the shortest route there is between a specification and a part that meets it.
It started in 1981. Hendro Sunjoto was manufacturing watch bracelets when he worked out that nobody in Indonesia was building loudspeaker drivers and that somebody ought to. He bought machines from Japan and Taiwan, hired a Japanese engineer to set up the line, and began supplying the car aftermarket. Everything since has followed one habit — making in-house whatever used to be bought in. Plastic injection came first, then steel chassis and zinc plating in 1983, T-yokes in 1985, cones and spiders in 1987, and it carried on from there. The 2008 expansion alone added more than 80,000 m².
On several of the factory walls there is an inscription in Indonesian. audioXpress translated it as “If It Can Be Perfect, Why Not?” — which, for a company that most of its own customers' customers have never heard of, is a fairly good summary of the attitude.
You have probably owned one already
Sinar Baja is, first and foremost, an OEM manufacturer. Most of what it makes leaves Surabaya under somebody else's badge — which is precisely why the name is unfamiliar to you and the output is not.
audioXpress reported in 2016 that its client list included Yamaha, Roland, Sharp, QSC, Wilson Audio and Steinway Lyngdorf, and that on the automotive side it ran to Honda, Toyota, Daihatsu, Suzuki, Isuzu, Hino, Kia, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Bentley, Aston Martin and Skoda. At the time of that visit, SB Acoustics — the brand we distribute — accounted for roughly 7% of group sales. The other ninety-three per cent is a large part of why the seven is any good: the tooling, the metrology and the quality procedures were all paid for by somebody else's volume.
The group runs its own brands at home as well — Rhyme Professional Audio, ACR and Legacy Car Audio — and holds ISO/TS quality certification with RoHS compliance. You can read the full tour at audioXpress.
Drawn in Denmark, built in Surabaya
SB Acoustics is the part of that factory pointed at people who read the measurements. The drivers are drawn by Danesian Audio in Denmark, a design house formed by engineers out of Scan-Speak, and built in Indonesia. audioXpress summarised the intent in six words: designed in Denmark, manufactured in Indonesia.
When the magazine visited, R&D at the main driver factory ran to 25 acoustical and mechanical engineers, with Danesian Audio's CEO Frank Nielsen heading development. That arrangement is behind every Satori and core-range driver we sell, and behind the SB Audience pro line as well.
Vance Dickason, Voice Coil / audioXpress · Test Bench, Satori MD60N-6
That is the whole reason we took the distributorship rather than the discount. More of what other people's reviewers have said is on our reviews page.
And the Dutch one
The third range we carry has nothing to do with Surabaya. Hypex Electronics is a separate company, founded in Groningen in 1996, and it makes Class D amplification: FusionAmp plate amplifiers with a DSP crossover on board, Nilai500 kits, and UcD modules. Around thirty people between Groningen and Eindhoven.
We took it on because the story rhymes. Hypex describes itself as “a world leading OEM specialist supplier, designer and manufacturer of Class D power amplifiers, power supplies, DSP solutions and plate amplifiers” — which is to say it spent two decades building the amplifier inside other companies’ products before selling under its own name, exactly as Sinar Baja did with drivers. UcD arrived in 2003, NCORE in 2011, Nilai in 2023.
And like SB, it owns its factory. Hypex has manufactured at scale since 2013 at Seetek EMS Sdn Bhd, its own production affiliate in Malaysia — around 80 on-site staff, ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2015, with boards going back to Groningen for final quality assurance. For a customer in Singapore or Malaysia that is worth knowing: the drivers come from next door and so does the amplifier.
One distinction we hold to throughout. We are the appointed distributor for SB Acoustics and SB Audience. Hypex we carry — a different arrangement, and we would rather say so than let the word do work it has not earned.
