It was actually not all that long ago, that I built my first loudspeakers ever. I built those from 4 salad bowls that I got from IKEA based on an idea I found on the internet one day. When I read about this idea of using IKEA´s BLANDA line of wooden bowls to reproduce sound, I immediately was intrigued. When it comes to design I strictly go by the old Bauhaus principle of “form follows function” but this time the function was to elegantly serve salad.
I have a rather nasty impulse to get into new topics, learn everything I can about whatever it is I stick my nose into and loose myself in learning. I would self diagnose that my obsession to engage in the unknown falls well within the realm of compulsive behavior. There are no choices to be made anymore or options to be contemplated once the compulsion kicks in. And this time it kicked in hard.
I learnt about how to simulate bass reflex boxes and calculated the amount of salad in cubic cm that one might serve in two of these bowls clamped together. I found out about Thiele Small parameters and scanned perhaps 50 different drivers for their ability to work well in wooden kitchenware. At some point my simulation came back with the promise of being pleasurable to the ear and I started scavenging parts.
The driver I finally chose was made by a Canadian company called Omega and featured a hemp cone. Hemp, I thought was good for many a thing and it must thus be fantastic for building loudspeakers. They also had Alnico magnets, which sounded mysterious and sophisticated and were generally cool to look at. Lastly the Omegas had a whizzer cone, which looked lovingly retro, and must therefore be great at whatever it was it did. But most of all these drivers needed exactly the volume of air I had available to serve salad. I immediately went and bought a pair of these wonderful things.
I spent months finding a horizontal circular saw big enough to cut the speaker hole and got the perfect binding posts of satin nickel, spikes to match, Next was a port tube, of course featuring golf ball dimples to keep turbulent air flow in check, and a hack saw to tune this port to the perfect frequency. Lastly some hurtfully expensive sealant goo to keep the air inside, and some rather lovely looking metallic clamps to hold things together and my BLANDAS, as they are called, were finished.
Who was not finished was I. Far from it. This was it, this was what I wanted to do, this was what I wanted to get good at.
I had started a company before and that was beginning to run itself and so, on impulse, I decided to build loudspeakers for a living. As I value professionalism, I went to get help from someone who had done this before and found Bjørn Johannesen a Norwegian living in Denmark. On diyaudio a forum for the do it yourself comminity this man had been patiently helping perfect strangers build better loudspeakers. He had done that for free and for the love of it. By the time I had found him in his gentle Scandinavian ways, he had already had 200´000 people interested in his work on quarter wave loudspeaker on this forum and the crowd was growing. I became a part.
My first approach to him was outright dismal. I wanted to build another of these very small loudspeakers that sound pretty good despite being far too tiny to sound pretty good. He patiently convinced me over and over again that size does matter and that our real market is somewhere between the gimmicky Bluetooth speakers that were clearly designed to fit in a cup holder, and the outright huge monsters that would never make it into the homes of any audiophile who intends to stay married and clear of verbal abuse.
I built my second pair of loudspeakers around a driver we carefully selected to be perfect for his design, but this time I called them prototypes. Now it was all about sound and since the acoustic design was already there, it took me exactly a trip to the home depot and two hours of fun with power tools to get music out of these things.
The result for me in my acoustic innocence was jaw dropping. The amount of detail in the music, the congruency of the bass notes with their harmonics, the tightness of the bass and the rather manageable size had me convinced. It seemed that we could get people 95% of the sound at 20% of the price with high-grade materials and good looks. I had immediate daydreams of handsome rewards and a better future.
I spent another few months developing the industrial design, learning all about sand casting grey iron and extruding aluminum. Once done, I saw my lawyer and made a trip the notary in Mexico where I live while Bjørn stepped into the Mexican embassy in Copenhagen and henceforth we were business partners. To this day, by the way, Bjørn and I have not met in person. I´d love to meet him some day he sounds perfectly lovely over Skype. And he knows a thing or two about loudspeakers.
My corporate lawyer Santiago, who derived the company bylaws, asked to be paid in speakers, my accountant bought the first three pairs and friends and family were becoming our first customers.
We set up shop on amazon, sold nothing at first, until Michelle form Portland decided to give us a go and on a whim sent a pair of SoundSommeliers to Steve Guttenberg reputed to be a rather tough reviewer for CNET. And then my life was ruined for the better.
I woke up the morning in November the review came out and had my budgeted sales for six months in the book. I was, and still am making, these loudspeakers in my kitchen and none of the suppliers were ready for this. We were out of stock on everything but hope that we could weasel through this somehow.
We immediately bumped the lead time up to six weeks, and orders just kept pouring in.
While our commercial design seemed apparently useless to serve salad, US customs and border control suspected it might indeed be rather handy to smuggle drugs. As dozens of suspicious little containers were being sent from Mexico to all over the world they grimmly looked for cocaine and found hand carded acoustic wool instead. Uninterested to reassemble the speakers into their original condition they threw everything back into the box. This left some "serious assembly required" to what must have been highly perplexed customers. Fear kicked in, hard. But were we would have deserved to be annihilated through disgruntled customers on amazon reviews and elsewhere on the Internet we found nothing but support and understanding for our birthing pain. The reviews were breathtakingly fantastic. We built dozens of speakers a second time to make things right.
And here we are six months later with our little company doing well and I marvel in gratitude for having survived my own naivety. Having stooped into a marvelous new world compelled by interest and passion rather than logic and reason I do credit myself to have a six sense for whom to trust around things. I trust Bjørn blindly to know his stuff. I´ll stick around for this one, my love and my passion for great sound stands strong. We are building a bookshelf form factor next. Can´t help myself.