Audio Design Associates (or "ADA" and even "Audio Design" as our friends often call us) was founded by Albert G. Langella and Peter T. McKean in 1977. The company was born from a two-store TV/radio/repair-shop that Peter took over in the late 1960's called Hartsdale Radio & TV located in Westchester County, NY, a suburb north of Manhattan. Albert, who displayed natural talent at an early age when it came to electronics, worked for Peter repairing stuff while in high school and later as he studied for his Bachelors in Engineering at the Pratt Institute of Technology.

By the mid-1970's, one of Peter's customer's was looking for a distributed audio system for his new home. Peter turned to Albert to build a custom system for this first client. Over the next few years, several more such customers came along forcing Langella to reconsider the custom "one-off" system designs he had provided to date. At this time, Albert began designing two first generation multi-room systems that offered flexible system design and that were also expandable to cover very large homes. Coinciding with Albert's graduation from college, he and Peter incorporated ADA in May of 1977.

For the first ten years, ADA primarily manufactured its components and systems for installation by its own custom installation division. System 10 was ADA's first single-zone multi-room system and System 56 was ADA's first multi-source, multi-zone, multi-room system. As an aside, many of these first generation ADA systems are still completely functional and operational today, and several of these have been updated with today's digital technology lending credibility to our claim of obsolescent-free technology. While we garnered great press in the electronic magazines of the day, our business took on national and international opportunities when life-style and design publications began covering our installations. Because of exposes in premier publications like Town & Country, Vogue, GQ, and Interior Design (to name just a few), other Hi Fi retailers began to enquire as to how they could sell and install our systems for their own clients.