Brand overview: Rodec

Rodec

Back in 1954 the music industry was, except for a few big players, a meeting place for music lovers and fanatics who found it difficult to find in the market what their ears or minds really wanted in terms of natural music reproduction.
This situation resulted in a number of esoteric brands entering the market, with largely hand crafted 'one off' equipment, without being distracted too much by decidedly un-cool considerations such as production economies or even profit.
ROger DEClerck was one of these fine engineers who initially designed and produced products for himself and a number of close friends, as well as making modifications to existing equipment to improve sound. He opened his first store in Antwerp where music addicts were more than welcome to live their passion.

The name RODEC was born, with initially a limited range of valve amplifiers, mono, and a number of specific 'one-off' products, built on special order only. From there on, RODEC embarked on the design of a number of 'mobile' units like the P418 and ancestors, that were mainly used at presentations, shows and fancy fairs as sound enforcement for public announcements.

According to the memory of those pioneers of the early days, as early production archives are non-existing, the first RODEC mixers appear around 1970, when the decision was made to offer a number of high quality preamplifiers which offered a most creative feature whereby one source could be faded out, while another source could be faded in. The audio mixer - as the workhorse of the DJ- was born!

These models were known as CU881, CU882, CU888 and 1572, each consequent model offering higher and more specifications than the previous one. With these preamps a number of power amps were available, always within the same basic philosophy that sound performance and build quality had to be immaculate.

With this reputation of producing sturdy equipment, RODEC rapidly became the standard in many fixed and mobile music systems in the entertainment industry, being one of the very first to introduce a number of features which invariably set the standard throughout the entire industry. To name just a few, as far back as 1970 where RODEC introduced talk-over, gain per channel and equalisation, resulting in the final evolution to MX-18 with triple tone control per input channel. This feature has since been copied all over the world up to the nearly identical frequencies as used by RODEC.

The pioneering days of solitary engineering genius in a garage converted to a workshop are gone, but the need for product update has not. Today, the RODEC R&D department is on-line with professional DJ's all over the world, music lovers as well as fanatics, to make sure RODEC continues to design what they want, today and tomorrow.

As of 2015 production of new models has stopped and all remaining spare parts will be used to service models still in the field.

'Rodec production stop. As you probably have noticed, Rodec has been going through a number of changes over the past few years. Due to the economic recession after 2008 we have been forced to reorganize our production and over the last five years we have tried to get control of our expenses in production as far as labor cost, parts supply and overall availability of components are concerned. Disposable mass production electronics have invaded the market.

The quality components that make up hand crafted RODEC mixers have become scarce, their sourcing unreliable and pricing erratic. The environment to maintain a small scale production at stable pricing no longer exists.

This is why we in Antwerp call for a time-out. We will discontinue production in Antwerp.

Our current components stocks will be used to service Rodec mixers for years to come, and we will continue to provide that same service to our international customers with schematics, manuals and spares as before. All accessories will be continued. Hopefully we will in the near future be able to offer a valuable alternative to the production we have cherished in house for so many years.'