Founded by American entrepreneur Frederick Whitney Horn in association with Japanese partners, Nippon Denki Onkyō Kabushikigaisha (which literally translates “Japan Electric Sound Company”) first came into existence in 1910 as part of Nippon Chikuonki Shokai (the Japan Recorders Corporation). The two words – ‘denki’, the Japanese for ‘electric’, and ‘onkyo’, the Japanese for ‘sound’ – would become essential for the future of the company.

At the time, Denon’s parent company was making single-sided recording discs and gramophones, until then used for little more than voice recording. After all, this was only a few decades after Edison first invented his phonograph, which ‘wrote sound’ onto a wax cylinder, and Emile Berliner had only recently started the transition from cylinders to the kind of discs we still play, In the process coining the term ‘gramophone’. Back in America, shoppers were still being intrigued by a cylinder player announcing ‘I am the Edison Phonograph’!

The new company became not only the first consumer audio manufacturer to sell a gramophone, but also Japan’s first record company. That illustrates why Denon – as the name of the company soon became in the 1930s, taking the first syllables of Denki and Onkyo – has always been at the forefront of ‘Electric Sound’, not only producing the equipment made to reproduce music and movie audio, but also being a key part of the recording process.