75 Years of Delivering Audio Solutions

As Dan Digre walks the factory floor of the MISCO facility, the voice of his father, MISCO founder Cliff Digre, echoes in his mind.

"One of my father's favorite expressions was 'find a way or make one,'" Digre says, underscoring the mantra on which the company was founded in 1949.

That evergreen business philosophy has held true for the son of the founder. As president and CEO for the past three and a half decades, Digre reflects on his father's words as MISCO celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2024.

"My parents were very, very innovative," Digre says. "That value of wanting to improve things—for themselves, for their family, for their employees, and for their customers. 

"That was a pretty important value for them."

MISCO's founders, Cliff and Bernice Digre, were married after Cliff returned home from Europe at the end of World War II, where he served as a radio operator on B-17 bombers.

As Cliff settled back into civilian life, he went to school to learn to repair radios. When the loudspeaker of a radio that he and Bernice received as a wedding gift started to sound scratchy, Cliff took it to Minnesota's only loudspeaker repair company.

The results were unsatisfactory, leading Cliff to realize an opportunity. Together with Bernice, he created the Minneapolis Speaker Reconing Company.

"In many ways, my mother was my dad's first customer because it was her radio that her parents had given them," Digre says with a smile. "We still have the radio at MISCO. And the loudspeaker my dad fixed still works 75 years later."

Gift for Repair Leads to Opportunity

Customers began to notice Cliff's repair work resulted in better sound quality than when those loudspeakers were new. Soon, Cliff transitioned from solely repairing loudspeakers to manufacturing his own high-quality products.

Drive-in movie theaters were hugely popular in 1956, and MISCO was there to bring soundtracks alive with its specially designed and rugged outdoor 4-inch loudspeaker.

As the company began to grow, the approach remained the same, and the relationships Cliff and Bernice forged with their customers flourished.

"One of the values that they had was trust," Digre says of his parents. "Trust in each other. And then building trust with everybody they did business with."

OEM Manufacturing Begins

The drive-in loudspeaker also served as an effective communications loudspeaker for the new and growing market of drive-thru restaurants. So, in the 1980s, MISCO narrowed its focus to original equipment manufacturing sales or OEM.

"That really changed the nature of the business and allowed MISCO to grow," Dan Digre points out, emphasizing the significance of OEM. "It moved us more into a wide variety of markets."

MISCO further refined its design and manufacturing, tailoring products to provide custom audio solutions for medical equipment, aviation, and military applications.

In 1990, Dan Digre was named president, poised to carry his father's vision forward. As the turn of the millennium beckoned, MISCO answered by expanding into a new factory in Minneapolis, which opened in 2002. 

The new facility allowed for increased capacity and new product innovations, ushering in the era of amplifiers to complement the increasing offering of MISCO.

"It was important for us because it allowed us to help a customer create an entire audio system for them to put into their product," Digre says.

Another significant milestone was the company's 2015 acquisition of Warkwyn Labs. This enabled MISCO to offer advanced tests and measurements to its customers and provide test and measurement services, Klippel equipment, and training to other businesses.

Just one year later, MISCO acquired Oaktron, creating an opportunity to partner with NASA to develop loudspeakers for the Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis project, which will eventually take humans to Mars.

After moving to its present factory in 2019, MISCO launched ToneSpeak, a premium, American-made line of guitar and bass speakers. The company also expanded customized manufacturing with advanced engineering, prototype design using 3D printing, robotic assembly, and increased capabilities to design and build loudspeakers ranging from two to 21 inches in size.

75 Years and Beyond

For Dan Digre, the past is a prologue as he looks forward to more innovations in the years ahead.

"What's next usually involves a customer asking us to do something and us figuring out a way to do it right," he says, reiterating his father's timeless core value. "Find a way or make one."

A company born of the static sounds emanating from a cherished radio three-quarters of a century ago continues to provide custom audio solutions to customers around the globe and into the cosmos.

"The legacy of MISCO even goes beyond what my parents started and beyond the work that I've done," Digre says. "You're building on 75 years, but you're not stopping at 75 years. You're looking to the future."