From the early 2000s, after graduating from the Faculty of Electrical and Electronics, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Mr. Nguyen Hoang Thi began his passion for audio equipment. Loudspeaker is the first field he researched and made. Many types of loudspeaker have been researched and DIYed in these years by Mr. Thi including closed, reflex, transmission line and horn loudspeaker.

After marrying in 2004, he has been greatly supported by his wife, Mrs. Nguyen Minh Chau (Joe Nguyen), in product design and in business development in the audio equipment industry. Mrs. Joe Nguyen graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Design, Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts. After graduating, she became a lecturer in the industrial design field at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture from 2004 to present.

Although Mr. Thi started the passion for loudspeakers, he continued to study vacuum tube audio equipment from 2005 to 2008 and participated in many DIY tube amplifier competitions in Vietnam. In the years 2008-2010, his vacuum tube amplifiers won the best specification award at the Vietnam Sumo tube amplifier contests.

After graduating, Mr. Van became an aviation engineer of the Vietnam national airline. He was trained in aircraft engineering in the United State of America before returning to Vietnam and taking part in Mr. Thi’s projects of making tube amplifier. With this partnership, Mr. Thi and Mr. Van have successfully researched and developed a bespoke Output Transformer technology used for our all tube audio equipment. Thanks to his experience and high standards in aircraft engineering, he has been trained in the US, our OPT always meets the best specifications and quality standards. Hitherto, our all OPTs are made in-house and strictly controled quality standard.

Also in 2008, the first commercial vacuum tube amplifier model was born under the brand name Air Power. With the great support from Mrs. Joe Nguyen in product design, business development and branding, the Air Power logo designed by Mrs. Joe Nguyen marked the birth of an audio equipment brand in Vietnam.

In 2010, while being awarded a government scholarship to study for a master’s degree in management and entrepreneurship in London, United Kingdom, Mrs. Joe Nguyen, who has a key role in building and developing our brands as well as in product design and development orientation, officially changed the brand name to ThivanLabs. She designed the ThivanLabs logo in London, featuring the Thivan phrase and the image of a beautiful woman in the middle. The words Thi and Van in Vietnamese mean Poetry and Literature, used in the logo with the implications of art and sophistication. The image of the beautiful woman who looks like dancing and holding her arms up high in the middle of the logo is meant to reach out to the most emotional beauty of music along with perfectionism and the most accuracy of sound reproduction. These are the goals that Mrs. Joe Nguyen wanted ThivanLabs and its products to achieve. Moreover, the image shows up her aspiration to create and build up ThivanLabs as a subject with a more distinct personality and identity. The change in the brand name also stems from her desire and plans to introduce audio equipment products made in Vietnam to the international market.

To accomplish this goal, Ms. Joe Nguyen has visited audio exhibitions and introduced ThivanLabs products to foreign distributors and dealers since 2013. With the aim of developing audio products to meet the criteria of slogan ‘Master of Performance’ and then ‘Like Live Music’, she has always enlisted to attend symphonic concerts while studying for her master’s degree in the UK and traveling to Europe to improve and cultivate her musical appreciation. These slogans have become ThivanLabs’s product philosophy. The best sound is the most realistic sound. Up to now, attending live concerts have always been maintained by Mr. Thi and Mrs. Joe to have the best comparison of real sounds and reproduced sounds.

In Mrs. Joe’s opinion, symphony is one of the best music genres to experience live concert for a manufacturer of sound reproducing equipment because it is the most difficult one to perform. It can be performed by the widest range of musical instruments and requires the skillful playing techniques of musicians and the coordination between musicians as well as groups of musicians and the conductor’s talent for orchestration. To get the best symphony concerts, they must be performed at the standard halls so that the acoustic quality is good and accurate. Next, live vocal performances are also very important for her to compare between reality and reproduction. At the present, she even learns to sing and play piano to understand more about music and also to develop the audio equipment for live recording and recording studio.

After 15 years (2000 – 2015), thanks to the product development orientation of Mrs. Joe Nguyen along with the technical development research of Mr. Thi, ThivanLabs engineering team has fabricated a wide range of vacuum tube audio equipment and custom-made speaker projects. With a very good aesthetic thinking and rich experience in industrial product design, Mrs. Joe Nguyen has played a very important role in orienting the R&D and almost all of product design process. In 2015, the first commercial loudspeaker model Fullrange 10 was launched in Vietnam, marking the beginning of production of commercial loudspeakers under the ThivanLabs brand. Her latest loudspeaker design is GrandHorn in 2019.