Paradigm Electronics is a well-respected loudspeaker manufacturer based in Mississauga, Ontario. It was founded in 1980 by speaker designer Scott Bagby and by sales and marketing specialist Jerry VanderMarel. From the outset both men envisioned a company that would produce serious high-performance, high-end loudspeakers—but speakers that would, by design, sell at accessible prices. The aim, as the company puts it, is to produce “the finest high-end high-value speakers available.”

The loudspeakers that first put Paradigm on the map were the 1982-vintage Model 7 and Model 9. It would be fair to say that these two products leveraged then-available materials technologies and design techniques to establish—in nascent form—the Paradigm “house sound.” Several words might be used to define that sound, among them: accuracy, neutrality, smoothness, and musicality.

Paradigm was (and continues to be) profoundly influenced by groundbreaking loudspeaker research conducted at Canada’s NRC (National Research Council) acoustics laboratories in Ottawa. The legendary Dr. Floyd Toole (a renowned expert on acoustics and loudspeaker performance assessment) guided much early NRC research work, collaborating and co-authoring research papers with many other men who went on to become prime movers in the Canadian loudspeaker industry, including Paradigm’s own Peter Schuck and Marc Bonneville.