Rane Corporation, founded and incorporated in 1981 in Washington State, is a privately held company. The owners all previously worked together in middle management positions at Phase Linear Corporation, a high-end consumer electronics company. With this background, they pooled over 40 years of combined audio experience to create Rane Corporation. Owners became separate department heads based upon their expertise. This organization created an unusually strong structure, since all department heads had a unique owner's perspective in making it succeed. The essential ingredients in Rane's successful philosophy are knowledge, integrity, pride and common sense. At Rane, people learn to treat people the way they would want to be treated, to design & build products the way they would want theirs designed & built, and that when something goes wrong, you react quickly and decisively to correct it. It is an old fashioned, common sense way to run a business, based on mutual trust and respect. Rane started out with four products aimed at small bands, designed to make their live performances better. At the forefront was a unique 12-input, 6-output matrix mixer (MM 12) used to create six different monitor mixes for driving stage monitor speakers. What Rane provided was new, compactly designed, affordable tools to help solve the many problems of on-stage monitoring. Complementing the matrix mixer was the industry's first 6-channel power amplifier (MA 6), and a companion 6-channel headphone amplifier for rehearsal (HC 6). The fourth initial product was a unique combo unit, consisting of a 1/3-octave graphic equalizer and a simple realtime analyzer (RE 27), aimed at giving the performing musician a handy, easy-to-use tool for improving their sound in all venues. In doing all this, Rane established a new price-point for performance, quality and reliability. Rane products were priced well below the top high-end equipment yet outperformed and outlasted them, but were still priced significantly above the low-end products -- thus creating a new middle ground.