The background for this is Michael Jackson’s long co-operation with the legendary composer and producer Quincy Jones and the recording engineer Bruce Swedien.
This co-operation goes all the way back to 1978 when Michael did his first film “The Wiz” with Diana Ross. Quincy Jones was arranging the film's musical score and Bruce Swedien was the recording engineer. This was the first project they did together and the next one was the album “Off the Wall” that really started Michael’s solo career. After this Michael and Bruce Swedien worked together on albums like: Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory and Invincible.
Electrocompaniet was established in 1973 and in 1976 the company got an international breakthrough when the Audio Critic named The Two-Channel Audio Power Amplifier ”the world best sounding amplifier”. After this Electrocompaniet won lots of awards and amplifiers from a small company in Norway was sent to all corners of the world.
There were scarce resources to spend on advertising and marketing and many amplifiers were sold on recommendations from customers and by ”Word of Mouth Marketing”. It was important to get a good relationship with the professional music community and one way of getting this was to lend out amplifiers to musicians, producers and recording engineers. This way amplifiers from Electrocompaniet ended up with members of ABBA and a-ha.
Much by coincidence and personal relationships Bruce Swedien agreed to test some amplifiers from Electrocompaniet. And an a pair of amplifiers where brought by plane ( overweight) to his Larrabee Studio on Lakershim Boulevard in Studio City in Los Angeles.
Bruce Swedien got immediately captures by these amplifiers that he thought was the best this side of tube-amplifiers - in his own words “this amplifier changed my life” – After this he has insisted on using Electrocompaniet amplifications on all his recordings.