WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
Rael Greenspan. The man who started Image Audio in Durban back in 1994, however his story goes back a few years prior. Rael left school in 1988 and immediately started to work for Brett Farquharson at Auto Audio in Pietermaritzburg. Brett is the main guy behind the highly successful company Audio Motive Distributors who are the direct importers and distributors of audio products such as Rockford Fosgate, Cerwin Vega and XS Batteries to name but a few.
In 1988 Rael who is technically trained and business minded, began executing his plan to venture out into the business world on his own. Armed with his trusted team of installers, they opened and ran Image Audio in Durban, which they later built into a legacy. The store became the birth place of a number of South African record holders and best of all was that they were able to maintain those records for many years.
MEET THE TEAM
RAEL GREENSPAN
MANDLA • LENNY • SANJAY
Back then taxis ruled the roost as they always had the biggest and meanest systems around. Most of them had multiple amps and batteries and building a taxi with four 15-inch subs was the norm.
With the taxi market dying off because of politics not allowing taxi’s to have loud sound sytems, Rael decided to keep busy on a new project. He built a Ford Batum bakkie that was filled with twelve 15-inch Rockford Fosgate woofers, twenty four Rockford Fosgate Power 500 mono-block amplifiers, of which two were strapped together on each subwoofer, they trapped two per a sub. This set up was powered by twelve Deltec batteries and six 2 Volts cells and held onto it’s title of the loudest in SA for about four years. As Rael grew out of SPL and started to rather focus his energy on building loud pounders that looked great, he transformed the Bantum into a real show-piece that really rocked. As things progressed, he soon opened a second branch of Image Audio, this time in Umhlanga. The Umhlanga store did really well as it helped reduce the work load from the Durban store; however it wasn’t long afterwards that Rael felt the need to take a break from building cars and decided to migrate overseas Rael eventually came back to South Africa to open up store in Ballito which was the birth of Altra Audio
