Origins · engineering
Parasound was founded in 1981 by Richard Schram in San Francisco, California, in a stealth address south of Cesar Chavez in a gritty industrial corner of the city. The technical core of the brand is the designer who has worked as Parasound's premier engineer since 1989: John Curl, whose career before Parasound included building electronics for The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Mark Levinson, Wilson Audio, and Mobile Fidelity. The HALO JC product line bears Curl's initials, and the engineering ethos is consistent across the catalog — refined analog circuits, conservatively specified power supplies, transformer designs that cost more than competitors include at the price, all sold at a fraction of the boutique-amplifier price the same engineering would normally command. Parasound is a small, independent, owner-operated company that has never been acquired and has never moved upmarket out of the value-engineering segment its identity rests on.
What Definitive carries
The line spans the HALO catalog top to bottom. The JC 1+ monoblocks are the reference monoblock pair — 450W into 8 ohms, dual-mono construction, the descendant of the original JC 1 that established the line. The JC 5 stereo amplifier is the same engineering in a single chassis at $2,990 less than a pair of JC 1s — 400W per channel into 8 ohms, in continuous production since 2018. The JC 3+ phono preamplifier sets the same bar for analog front-end electronics. Below the JC tier sits the A-Series (A 21+ stereo amp, A 23+ stereo amp) and the P 6 preamplifier/DAC, a 2.1-channel preamp with a built-in DAC that competes with dedicated boutique preamps at multiples of the price.
Where it sits in the room
In the value-engineered American amplification conversation Parasound is in a category largely of its own — most competitors building electronics at this level price three to five times higher. The differentiation is the John Curl design pedigree and a manufacturer that has resisted three decades of pressure to move upmarket. For dealers carrying a serious American amplification line, Parasound is the answer when a customer's system budget rules out McIntosh or D'Agostino at the amplifier slot.