Velodyne Acoustics was founded in 1983 in Silicon Valley, California, by engineer and inventor David Hall, whose fascination with bicycle racing lent the company its name. Backed by a loan from his grandfather, Hall set out to solve a problem that had frustrated audio engineers for decades: how to reproduce genuinely deep, distortion-free bass without the boom and imprecision typical of subwoofers at the time.

Hall's breakthrough arrived with the ULD-18, built around a patented accelerometer-based High Gain Servo system that continuously monitored and corrected the movement of the speaker cone itself — reducing bass distortion from an industry-typical 15-30% down to less than 1%, even at high volume. That relentless engineering focus made Velodyne a genuine pioneer in powered subwoofers, and the company went on to introduce the world's first DSP-controlled subwoofer in 2003, backed by a portfolio of over 200 patents.