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Michael Lacina

Founding partner, Michael Lacina, was apparently out of the room when his partners Jeff and Kip picked JK as the name for their sound company, 25 years ago. But that didn’t stop him from dedicating more than half a life time to building an independent business with an up from the boot straps mentality. Like many people in the Pro Audio business, Lacina dove into the field with neither a technical nor a business background. Equipped with a Bachelor of Arts degree from De Pauw University, with a major in creative writing and a minor in classical piano, Lacina started the wood shop at JK Sound and began designing and building custom speaker cabinets. He learned the principles of sound system design and became fascinated with the concept of time alignment within a system; the idea that the high, mid and low frequencies all reach the listening area at the same instant. Building early time-aligned systems in the 80’s, Lacina found that vocals were easier to understand and volume was increased when the woofer and the tweeter of a speaker system were in perfect time alignment.

Soon his proposals for system designs were wining bids for Bay Area night clubs. With the installation of a fully custom system at Club DV8 in San Francisco, Lacina’s reputation as a respected sound engineer was sealed. The system at DV8 was unlike any other heard in the Bay Area at that time. A 5 way, four corner surround sound system, it featured the first BSS Omnidrive time aligning digital processor ever used in a night club. The reaction to the system was overwhelming, and very quickly other clubs began to move to upgrade their sound. With his services being eagerly sought after, Lacina had to seek partners to keep up with the demand; so he teamed up with Eastern Acoustic Works, a company that already had 140 different speaker cabinets in their offerings. EAW also had the willingness and the ability to alter some of their stock designs to meet the needs of certain high profile sound system installations on which Lacina was working. This effort culminated in 3 nominations for Best Sound System at the Club World Awards at the Winter Music Conference in Miami, form which Lacina emerged with the Disco Ball Trophy in 2006. He continues to strive to attain sound excellence and is currently working on new system designs for Yoshi’s Jazz Club, Fusion Lounge, The Ritz on Redondo Beach and Club 1015.