By Tom Miller,
Play Total Home Entertainment
Spring 1997 A bright December day that felt like
October. The speedometer in Gayle Sanders' Porsche Carrera
4 was holding steady at 80 mph as we purred toward his
home outside Lawrence Kansas. The radar detector was
on and Sanders looked over and said with a grin, Let
me show you what she'll do!" With that the purr rose
in pitch, the speedo swept across the dial and our fellow
travelers seemed to stop on the road and then just as
quickly, Sanders backed off and the world started again.
Effortless.
Founder, owner and leader of MartinLogan,
a manufacturer of high-performance speakers, Sanders
moves through the world in much the way that Porsche
ripped through traffic-at full speed. I'm not sure anyone
has seen him slow down. And his renowned loudspeaker
designs move with he nimbleness of the Porsche.
MartinLogan manufacturers electrostatic
speakers for the audio/video enthusiast holds sound quality
as the first priority. The hallmark of the electrostatic,
which creates sound by vibrating an impossibly thin sheet
of mylar between two electrical elements known as stators,
is speed. The kind of speed that doesn't sound fast tracing
the quick lines of live music. Nothing's perfect, but
the speed and resolution of electrostatic speakers have
attracted one of the most devoted followings in high-performance
audio, dating back to the mid-Fifties when Peter Walker
in England introduced the Quad ESL (still a cult fave
after 40 years).
"Nothing's
perfect but the speed and
resolution of electrostatic speakers have attracted
one of the most devoted followings in high
performance audio..."
The mid-Eighties, when Martin-Logan
came to prominence, were the heyday of electrostatic
and other "planar" speakers (designs that differ from
traditional cone speakers by producing sound with a large
panel driver of some type). Since then, speakers using
cone drivers have come to dominate the high-performance
audio market and many of the companies designing planar
speakers have fallen on hard times. That's not the case
for MartinLogan, which has not only survived but has
thrived in this new age. MartinLogan's success has been
so visible and apparently easy that it seems almost effortless.
Truth be told, it was anything but.
MartinLogan was founded in the early
Eighties by Gayle "Martin" Sanders and Ron "Logan" Sutherland,
who now leads Sutherland Engineering, also of Lawrence,
Kansas. Having developed a new electrostatic driver after
hours of research at the University of Kansas library
and experimentation in their homes, they launched the
company with the Monolith. This speaker, just now coming
to the end of a remarkably long life, was a hybrid design,
meaning that the task of reproducing music is divided
between an electrostatic driver for the higher frequencies
and a cone driver for the bass. Most of MartinLogan's
current speakers are hybrids.
This hybrid approach ultimately led
MartinLogan to the success it now enjoys. But in the
early Eighties the Monolith was a very expensive speaker
and the company was limping along. It needed another,
more affordable product. Or else. That product was the
legendary CLS, and it nearly sank the company.
In an industry run by and devoted to
purists, the purest form of electrostatic is the single-panel
speaker. One panel handles all the sound from the bass
to the treble without any crossovers to distort the sound.
Sanders and Sutherland set out to create this audio unicorn
at a price that music lovers could afford. The result
was the CLS, a large panel speaker. Sanders was adamant
that the driver's curvature be uniform so that it would
launch a perfectly dispersed waveform.
The first production run of 100 CLS
speakers was built and quickly sold to a hungry market.
Materials for larger production runs were purchased.
Then it all came apart - literally: the parts just wouldn't
hold together under operating conditions and the speakers
were coming back. Sanders saw his dream crumbling. The
product he had bet his company on was a bust.
Late one night, alone in his small
factory in an old industrial building, Sanders faced
the end. There was no way out, the company was ruined.
Leaning against a post next to a stack of CLS drivers,
Sanders closed his eyes and wept in frustration. After
a few moments, he opened his eyes and looked down at
the trail his tears traced along the perfectly curved
drivers and saw the answer. What if the outside edges
of the driver was flattened slightly so that only the
center portion was perfectly curved? It would be a compromise,
true, but it might work.
"Sanders
faced the end. After a few moments,
he opened his eyes and looked down at the trail his
tears traced along the perfectly curved
drivers and saw the answer."
And it did. More than that, it saved
the company. The newly shaped panels held up under stress,
the CLS was quickly discovered by adoring reviewers,
sales exploded and MartinLogan soared.
Today, that old factory is the MartinLogan
shop where speaker cabinets are built and painted under
the rigorous control of Steve Glass, who has a Masters
degree in a material technology. Just one small part
of the MartinLogan machine, the cabinet shop is a microcosm
of Sanders' modern company. High technology is pressed
into service each day as Glass devises new ways to build
and finish the cabinets to higher standards with greater
efficiency.
The business office, electrostatic
manufacturing center and final assembly facility are
located across town. Sanders runs the company as a paradigm
of modern business thought. His success proves that empowering
employees can and does work. Next to his office, his
chief electronics designer Joe Vojtko works on next year's
model. Chuck Stewart runs the day-to-day operations of
building and shipping speakers while his son, Mike, is
in charge of advertising and inside sales. Although Sanders
is involved in every part of his business, his managers
and, in turn, employees are encouraged to take the initiative
and make decisions. And they're rewarded when their ideas
make a profitable difference.
Until recently, Sanders was the sole
industrial designer of each MartinLogan speaker. Last
year, David Allen an industrial designer from PP&G,
joined the company. His work can be seen in Martin-Logan's
new superspeaker system, the Statement. The new Statement
is more than its 7-foot tall 18-inch wide electrostatic
driver. There is a line of 6-inch cone drivers on a thin "mast" that
stands alongside the panel and a set of big sub-woofers
in separate structures to handle big bass (down to 6Hz).
Making a big speaker look good is extremely
difficult. Working from the basic architecture that Sanders
decreed for the $60,000 Statement, Allen gave the 7-foot
main panels a graceful sweeping line that invokes the
billowy power of a full sail at sea. Allen's work area,
tucked in beside the cabinet shop, is full of design
projects that speak of a bright future for MartinLogan
The place vibrates with creative energy.
"Allen's
work area, tucked in beside the cabinet shop,
is full of design projects that speak of
a bright future for Martin Logan
The place vibrates with creative energy."
Arriving at Martin-Logan's main office
at midday on a Saturday, I expected to find the door
locked. It wasn't. Walking in, I didn't immediately see
anybody, even though there were a number of cars in the
lot. Wandering tentatively, I walked into the MartinLogan
reference room and got my first look at the new Statements.
The main panels were finished and would soon be shipped
to Las Vegas for the Winter CES. The place looked like
an audiophile's fantasy - Krell and Audio Research amplifiers
littered the floor, MIT cables snaking between them;
Theta and Krell electronics were stacked high on a rack
and there, atop it all, was the rare and prized Sutherland
C-1000 preamplifier, built by Sanders' old partner. The
system played softly. Still, nobody had seen me. I shut
the soundproof door, dug out some of my CDs and turned
up the volume.
Effortless. Now, that's a real statement.
|
