Mark Levinson

Mark Levinson (born December 11, 1946) is an American audio equipment designer, recording and mastering engineer, multi-instrumentalist musician, and serial entrepreneur responsible for developing some of the most respected products and brand names in the high-performance audio industry.Formerly, he worked as the bassist for five years (1966 - 1971) for jazz pianist Paul Bley and played with other renowned jazz musicians of the period. He was formerly married to the actress Kim Cattrall.

Levinson founded Mark Levinson Audio Systems (MLAS, Ltd.) in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1972. He ran MLAS from 1972 to 1980, during which time he created products such as the LNP-2 preamplifier.

However, by 1980 MLAS was in serious financial trouble. Levinson then asked Sanford Berlin, a retired executive in the audio industry, to invest in MLAS and to aid in the management of the company, which Berlin did, personally investing $480,000 in the company and persuading several others to invest an additional $300,000. In the summer of 1984 Levinson left MLAS and founded another company to produce audio equipment, Cello Ltd. Levinson became president and one of the three directors of Cello.

MLAS launched a lawsuit attempting to prevent Levinson from working in the audio industry for the rest of his life, on the grounds that he was a “walking trade name” who could “diminish the value of their asset.”

In 1986, Levinson won the case but lost the right to use his name as a trade name on an audio product. For this reason, since several years before the lawsuit, "Mark Levinson" branded audio products have had no relationship to the brand's founder; the "Mark Levinson" brand name has been and continues to be an intellectual property wholly owned by Harman International. In resolving the case, the New York Second Circuit Court wrote a 25-page decision that outlined the rights of an entrepreneur who uses his own name as the name of a company. Levinson himself has continued to work in the industry, creating several new companies and many respected products.

Levinson ran his second company, Cello Ltd., from 1984 to 1998. With Cello, Levinson created high-priced models such as the Audio Palette, now a highly collectable vintage audio component, selling on the used market for three times its initial price. In 1999, Levinson founded Red Rose Music, an audio company with its own New York retail store on Madison Avenue. The concept of Red Rose was more compact affordable products with very high quality sound.

In 2007, Levinson moved to Switzerland and used his consulting revenue to finance the founding of Daniel Hertz S.A., a high-performance audio equipment and audio software company with a holistic approach, that considers the quality of recordings an important part of the playback system.

Levinson and the actress Kim Cattrall were married from 1998 to 2004; the couple co-wrote the book Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm (2002).