What is "lawo"

Lawo is an international company based in Rastatt, Germany, specializing in the manufacture of digital mixing consoles and other professional audio equipment. It was founded in 1970 by Peter Lawo, and is currently run by his son Philipp. The company is notable for supplying the audio mixing equipment for the 2012 London Olympics and Nine Network, and for sports events in Asia, North America and Australia.

The first developments of Peter Lawo were driven by the needs of composers of electronic music like Karlheinz Stockhausen. To Stockhausen's specifications Peter Lawo built an apparatus called "module 69 B" which was used to perform Stockhausen's composition Mantra. The success of this production led to the founding of the Experimentalstudio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of the Südwestfunk in 1971. Together with the first director of this studio, Hans-Peter Haller, Peter Lawo developed the Halaphon. (The name resulted from the names of the developers: HA(ller)-LA(wo)-PHON). This machine became famous when being used in all the later works of composer Luigi Nono.

Later, Peter Lawo developed mixing consoles for Stockhausen, whose composition Oktophonie was produced in the Studio for Electronic Music of the German Public Broadcaster WDR ( Westdeutscher Rundfunk). For the production of this composition, the automatic recall of very fast fader movements was used—which was made possible by Lawo's hybrid mixing console PTR ("Programmierbare Ton Regie" = programmable audio control).