Not An Audiophile – The Podcast featuring podcast episodes Peter Comeau. Director of Acoustic Design for brands such as Wharfedale, Mission and Castle, Peter chats to Andrew Hutchison on Episode 031. We get a scoop on the newest Castle model in final testing and a secret Wharfedale high end project.
Podcast transcripts below – Episode 031
TRANSCRIPT
S2 EP031 Peter Comeau. The genius and beauty of designing for music.
Andrew Hutchison: I
Andrew Hutchison: I suspect if you’re building $300,000 loudspeakers, you can kind of make them. I mean you could. You perhaps also almost should be laying down the rules for the kind of space that they should be in. But when you’re building something that’s quite.
Peter Comeau: Affordable, you’ve got to be, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve talked to people who buy upwards of 100,000 pound loudspeakers and if you went to them and say, I want to put these absorbers in your room, they go, you are not ruining my decor.
Peter Comeau is the director of acoustic design at IAG
Andrew Hutchison: And we’re back. Episode 31, Season 2 of Not An Audiophile. The podcast. Today Peter Comeau is on the line to answer my oddball questions. He has the knowledge as the, director of acoustic design at IAG and a lifetime of hi Fi experience manufacturing, selling and writing about it, not to mention all the design work that he does at IAG for Wharfedale mission. Let’s get to it.
Not an Audiophile is a media partner of the 2025 Stereonet hi Fi and AV Show. This year it’s bigger than ever. Hi Fi Home Cinema Headphones. Three days of what is basically a home Entertainment Expo from the 29th to the 31st of August in Melbourne Pullman Hotel. More details @stereonet.
Peter, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Peter Comeau: My pleasure to talk to you.
Andrew Hutchison: You’ve been interviewed enough times that you’ve covered most of your thoughts on loudspeaker design. So I thought I’d ask a few slightly different questions of course, and ones that I suppose are of personal interest to me. but I feel like as I put to you, that balance of a loudspeaker is kind of the thing that you notice first when you, you know, when someone switches the system on the balance between treble and bass, but also just the balance through the mid range is kind of, I guess it’s the character of the, of the loudspeaker. Is that something you, would agree with?
Peter Comeau: Well, I think it’s the character of the whole hi Fi system. I think your original question was how do you engineer a speaker, or any hi Fi component for that matter, more for music so it’s less hi Fi and that is the question of balance. I discovered this when I was selling hi Fi equipment, first of all in London and then back down in my hometown in the uk, Plymouth where I was managing a shop. And we were really drawing a distinction even then between hi Fi and what we considered to be music Playing systems because everybody that came in wanted a hi fi. But the reason they wanted a hi fi was to play music. They didn’t come in and go, oh, what’s the bass like? What’s the mid range like? What’s the treble like? I came in really wondering, I’ve got a bunch of records or tapes and, how do I get more enjoyment out of the music on these things? So I borrowed a term from the classical music repertoire called musical. And musical, as far as I understand it, is in the musicians part of the world, is about when performers bring a composition to life in a way that they believe the composer intended. Because, you know, as a musician you can go and play all the notes in all the right order, but it doesn’t mean that it grabs people emotionally.
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.
Peter Comeau: So I felt that that was a good term to apply to certain pieces of hi fi equipment that I was selling at that time. For instance, the Linn Sondek LP12, which grabbed the emotion of the listener, in a way that made music more enjoyable. and then when I started writing for hi fi magazines, I started using this term musical. And it caught on. amongst other reviewers.
Andrew Hutchison: Hang on. So you invented the expression musical because it is kind of a, It’s an important term, isn’t it? Because. And in fact, your description of the reason for that term is of course the best I’ve heard. But then, then you are the inventor of the term. So I mean, that’s, it’s, it’s. That’s a great trinket. Because, so, because it’s such a. Like you say, you can. You can play the notes, but that doesn’t make you a musician. Right. So. And it doesn’t make, It doesn’t create, as you say, an emotionally grabbing piece of music.
00:05:00
Andrew Hutchison: And so do go on. But I mean, I love that. I mean that is. That is the best analogy or the best descriptor of the term a musical hi F system that I’ve probably ever heard. and did you invent any other terms that we should know about?
Peter Comeau: Well, for a start, I didn’t invent the term. I borrowed the term. Brought it into a. Yeah, I borrowed it and brought it into the realm of hi fi. because it was the only way I could easily think in print of how to get across the idea that a piece of equipment was actually relaying the emotion in the music. The emotion, of course, that comes from the performance. And there were some pieces of equipment that did that really well. and if you cast your mind back to the late 70s, early 80s in hi Fi, for those of you who’ve ever looked at the history, or for those of you who are, as old as me and can remember that era, there was a great. There was a great axis between Lin, products and name audio indeed. because both of them were producing equipment which had those virtues of this adjective that I called musical indeed. And it’s very non. It’s. It’s. It’s. Although it’s obviously bound up in hi fi, it’s very non, what I would call non audiophiling because it’s not rooted into frequency response or distortion or anything other than you can measure. there’s something else going on which at first I found almost inexplicable. But later on, when I started designing equipment, I began to realize that when you start tinkering, for example, with loudspeaker crossovers, that it is actually all a question of balance.
Inside our heads we have the world’s finest graphic equalizer
Which brings you back. Brings us right back to your first question, which is, why do things need to sound balanced? Well, I’ve been musing on this for some years now.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: And the conclusion that I’ve come to, and it is only my opinion. I’m not saying this should be written in law or anything else, but it is only my opinion is that inside our heads we have the world’s finest graphic equalizer. Now, we know that it works because if I’m talking to you in, say, your lounge, which has presumably some soft furnishings in it and is reasonably absorbent, and we move into your kitchen, which is full of hard surfaces and little absorbency, your voice still sounds the same to me. But if I was to make a tape recording of your voice in your lounge and then move into the kitchen, it would change dramatically, especially if I made that recording in mono.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay?
Peter Comeau: So obviously what is going on inside our heads when we walk into the kitchen from your front room is that our brain, is immediately receiving all these signals which are bouncing off the hard surface of your kitchen and re equalizing the frequency response that is in, our heads so that your voice still sounds like your voice. And, that’s why I say we have inside our heads the world’s finest graphic equalizer. Now, that’s okay. It means that actually when you sit down, for example, with, let’s say, a pair of speakers which have a very exaggerated high frequency response, and I’ll come back to that later.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: when you’ve sat down for some time with these speakers, maybe For a few days, your brain sorts out what should be going on and flattens the response and everything sounds okay. the most extreme example I ever came across was when I went to visit somebody who had a pair of Lowthers.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: Now I don’t know how many people know about Lowthers but they are very odd full range loudspeakers with extremely lightweight paper cones and a wizard cone in the middle that produces the high frequencies. and they, they do not have a flat frequency response. They sound immediately you listen to them or certainly when I first listened to them as very colored and very skewed response wise. And I mentioned this to the guy who owned them and he said, no, no, no, they’re the world’s perfect loudspeakers as far as I’m concerned. Everything every other speaker I listen to sounds wrong.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, no doubt it does.
Peter Comeau: Now. Now if think about the fact that when he sits down to listen to a pair of speakers, he engages that filter in his brain, which compensates for his loudness, then yes, every other
00:10:00
Peter Comeau: speaker is going to sound wrong. Just this Lowthers sounded wrong to me.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, no doubt they would have because they’re quite strikingly colored when you first hear them. That’s, it’s, in fact, when you hear most enthusiasts, pet systems, they tend to have some obvious colorations which they clearly have either become used to or enjoy.
If your brain’s correcting system which is skewed in terms of balance, it feels uncomfortable
Peter Comeau: so let’s come back to balance, because that’s the important aspect of this. And I think the factor in this that I found out with regard to musicality is that if your brain’s having to do all this hard work trying to correct a system which is skewed in terms of balance, then it feels slightly uncomfortable. Ah, it’s having to. You’re not relaxed. You’re sitting there in a state of tension because you’re trying to, your brain is trying to figure out, for example, when you listen to, a piano, why the overtones, the harmonics of the piano are not matched to the fundamentals. When you listen to a violin.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: Why are the overtones so harsh in that, hypothetical speaker with the exaggerated high frequency response? Why the overtones increase, so much compared to the fundamental? Why do I have to work so hard to try and balance it again? Now obviously all this is happening in your subconscious. You’re not aware of it. But what, you are aware of is this feeling of tension because you’re tense, because you realize that you’re listening to something which is unbalanced, you cannot relax into the music and when you can’t relax into the music, you can’t grab that emotional aspect of the music which is so rewarding. So that is why we should aim for balance.
Andrew Hutchison: M. I love that, Peter. Thank you. That’s a beautiful explanation. And I guess, yes, the pain in your brain doing all that processing to kind of. I mean it’s not quite processing to EQ it back to flat or vaguely natural sounding. But, And I guess that’s where the term natural sounding comes in. I mean, implying that the loudspeaker has a similar balance to how you would hear the instrument in a fairly neutral acoustic space or maybe in a concert hall or something. Is that, do you think, speaking of terms, is that a. Is that a reasonable description of natural or is natural?
Peter Comeau: Yeah, well, I was talking to, a, hi fi reviewer the other day who judges components that he’s listening to by listening to classical music and chat and well, recorded jazz music. And he was saying, I don’t understand. He was in, in Canada, he was saying, I don’t understand. You guys in the UK and all your reviewers over there tend to judge things by using rock music or electronic music. you know what, how can you ever judge whether anything’s natural? I think you can, because. Because we always have. We can always rely on vocals, can’t we?
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean.
Peter Comeau: We know what the human voice should sound like, so at least you’ve got that to go by. But to a certain extent, I think it certainly helps. Helps if you do go to concerts and you listen to things live. because then you do get a better idea, especially you know, classical and jazz. Because then you do get a better idea of what real instruments sound like. You don’t have to do that.
Andrew Hutchison: Now there’s an interesting, there’s an interesting thing though that the Lowther listener or owner when he goes to a concert must have to make that equalization. I mean, he’s not thinking about it. His brain ear combination is making that adjustment. I mean, how.
Peter Comeau: No, no, he doesn’t. No, no, because he’s not listening to a loudspeaker. The point is that our, brains are really, really clever, you know?
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean, yes, my question.
Peter Comeau: They’re not processing, but they are incredible amount of processing all the time.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Even, Yes, even though it’s a natural sound.
Peter Comeau: When he go. He goes to a concert, he knows he’s going to listen to real instruments, so he switches his filters.
Andrew Hutchison: But that’s my question, Peter, is that he. He actually so almost Instantaneously, he can de. Equalize. That’s what you’re saying. And. But then you did, because you said you walk from the lounge to the. To the kitchen, and your brain makes an immediate, correction, if you like. So, yeah, so it does happen.
Peter Comeau: Because he’s focusing, is focusing on your vocal quality, not the surrounding quality.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: And, in terms of rooms, this is something else that we all naturally filter. So when we’re sitting in our listening rooms and we’re listening to a pair of speakers, we engage the filter, which
00:15:00
Peter Comeau: balances the sound in our room. And that’s an interesting one as well.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I kind of like that. I sort of. I have a little bit of a, you know, I mean, you know, we’ve all got our little annoyances, I suppose.
There seems to be a push towards some kind of reviewer review room
And I did mention also to you that, that, there seems to be a strong push towards some kind of reviewer review, quality room where you can only review hi fi equipment in a special space. Which seems to me counter intuitive when 99% of customers who buy a stereo system probably don’t have a special space. so then maybe the question to yourself as a designer is, do you design for special spaces that only reviewers have and people who have gone to the trouble of correcting their poor quality acoustics? Or do you design for a typical lounge room? Or do you not think about it?
Peter Comeau: Don’t think about it. We have at our disposal we have, completely fully acoustically corrected rooms.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: which sounds very dry and pretty, boring actually, I must say.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: But they do enable you to hear exactly what a piece of equipment is doing.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: and in terms of getting things like direct axial response and balance. Right. They’re very useful, but they’re not much use for designing speakers which are going to be used in the home. So for that we have other rooms, which are much more lively. And of course, I also make products own because A, because I want to know what it’s like to live with the design. and B, because I can engage other people like my wife, who’s got, very keen ears. In other words, she knows what sounds exciting and musical and what sounds boring and not. And the, the fine tuning really is done with a balance, those things.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter Comeau: Again, one of the, One of the things that, that, that I think a lot of certainly speaker designers in my acquaintance seem to have forgotten over the years. This was known in the. In the 70s and 80s, then conveniently forgotten about and then resurrected, in the 2000s. And that is that the reflected response off the room surfaces from a loudspeaker must match that of the axial response if the speaker isn’t going to sound colored. And that was the biggest problem with the loudness, by the way. so we can actually manipulate the performance for loudspeakers so that we get that right. nowadays we’ve got a term for it called the directivity index. and you can Even look at YouTube videos of people who investigate these things and see how the directivity index works theoretically. but it all comes back to this balance, that the balance of the sound bouncing off the walls of your room must be the same as the balance, the sound reasoning reaching you direct from the speakers. Otherwise you hear it as coloration. your ear and brain are very, very good at detecting this.
Andrew Hutchison: So is that perhaps you. Well, you obviously feel that it is. Is that one of the key sort of creators of coloration is that the on axis response is dramatically different perhaps or just somewhat different to the off axis response. That’s what you’re driving at. I take it you’d like to have this sort of not omnidirectional loudspeaker, but certainly one with a very even roll off of output, across all frequencies as, as you move away from the direct on axis position. That’s what you’re saying effectively, is it, Peter?
Peter Comeau: Yeah, yeah. especially with the, let’s say the 30 degree off axis response, because that’s the one which you’re going to, which you’re going to hear bounced off the side walls of your room.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: and this is actually where you don’t want to put room treatment in my estimation. A lot of people do. I’ve seen a lot of reviewers houses where they’ve got a lot of absorbency on the sidewalls of their room. And I think that again, it leads back to a very dead sounding experience. you want that reflection because it fills the room, it fills the sound out in your room. It gives you a much bigger feeling of space. yeah, I laugh when I read reviews of people saying, you know, reviewers saying, oh, there wasn’t much width with these speakers.
00:20:00
Peter Comeau: I couldn’t hear anything outside the space between the boxes. And I think, yeah, you couldn’t because you got absorbers on the samples of the room.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, thank you for that. You’re supporting my case a little bit because it does, it’s, it’s. I think part of my concern about that as well is that these absorbers are probably quite, ineffective at Most frequencies. and so kind of unbalancing the sound. And I think the reason this is someone who’s not a qualified expert in any way. But I feel as if foam, absorbers probably only work above, I don’t know, 1500 hertz or something. And, and so you get this quite. I think the dryness is, is, is that that sucked out feeling is. Is because largely that it’s kind of. It makes it. You’ve gone to this trouble of engineering a very well balanced speaker off axis and then they’ve kind of ruined it. Is that, is that something. Am I on the right track, do you think?
Peter Comeau: Yeah, that’s certainly. I can certainly pick out particular reviewers that. And one very, very famous magazine where this is a distinct problem. there’s nothing I can do about it. They want to listen in this sort of semi anechoic environment.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: and I just don’t get it because it’s not relating to how people are going to use those products at home.
Andrew Hutchison: No. I suspect if you’re building $300,000 loudspeakers, you can kind of make them. I mean you could perhaps almost should be laying down the rules for the kind of space that they should be in. But when you’re building something that’s quite afford, you’ve got to be.
Peter Comeau: Kid, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve talked to people who buy upwards of 100,000 pound loudspeakers and if you went to them and say I want to put these absorbers in your room, they go, you are not ruining my decor. I’ve spent a millions with an interior designer coming up with the looks of this house. You are not going to stick these horrible bits of foam all over my wall.
Andrew Hutchison: No, there is that of course, but it’s for getting back to the affordable end of the market. The reality is that I would suspect, and I, I guess you might agree based on your, you know, you’ve speak to people at shows that have bought your various products that you’ve created over the. Over many years. that, that they are not in acoustically correct rooms, if that’s even a thing. Because really what you’ve just said and I’m putting forward is that they’re not acoustically correct. They’re acoustically sort of odd. Odd in a way because they’re sucked out at certain frequencies. They’re quite reflective at other frequencies, lower frequencies I guess, and maybe very high frequencies. they’re actually quite unbalanced. But then no room is perfect, right?
Peter Comeau: I suppose, you can make a perfect room. well, I say perfect in that you will hear the direct response from the speakers very, very clearly. But it’s a pretty unemotional experience because what you’re wanting from a hi fi system is something which is almost a fantasy. You’re taking two transducers in the room for a stereo system, which is what most audiophiles listen to, and you’re basically saying, what is the space that these performers are recorded in? What is this acoustic space that I’m trying to place these instruments and vocalists in? And if you’re listening in a very dry and very, very well damped and acoustically treated room, you don’t get much impression of that. You usually can hear things spaced out very clearly in between the speakers, but they are very much associated with the speakers generally. Whereas what you want is something that’s maybe either.
You need an acoustic space to put transducers in if you’re generating illusion
You know, I’ve talked to people who want to sit in the stalls and I’ve talked to people who want to sit in the balcony. You know, the people who want to sit in the balcony want a very distant view, of what’s going on. The people who sit in the stalls want something happening right in between the speakers or projected in front of the speakers. But that illusion is something that we’re trying to generate with a hi fi system.
Andrew Hutchison: indeed.
Peter Comeau: And you need an acoustic space to put those transducers in if you’re going to generate that illusion.
Andrew Hutchison: So I feel my advice sometimes to people is that if you’ve got carpet in the room and some soft furnishings by way of a lounge and, or lounges, chairs and some drapes, etc. You probably actually don’t need a lot more absorption, particularly if you then put a few humans in the room and a dog or something. I mean
00:25:00
Andrew Hutchison: that’s probably nearly enough absorption in your average room. Lounge room.
Peter Comeau: Bookshelves. Book bookshelves help as well. Yeah, the, the, the en. The enemies are hard fl. Exposed hard flooring and glass. Yeah, those are your biggest.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes. Shiny, hard, large areas of flat surface, I guess that are, that create nasty, harsh or hard reflections. And but if, yeah, if you’ve got a certain amount of soft furnishings, then from there on, if you were going to treat the room acoustically, you would probably add more diffusion than you would add absorption perhaps. Is that if assuming you could do it over a fairly broad frequency range, do you think or do you have any strong thoughts on that?
Peter Comeau: You could, you can, you can add diffusers by all means. As I, as I said, book bookcases.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yes.
Peter Comeau: They’re your friends.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes indeed.
Peter Comeau: Do wonderful things.
Andrew Hutchison: They kind of are. It’s a shame that Well, I suppose these days with the way things have gone in the hi Fi industry, the bookcase is replaced with the giant rack of records and if you were to leave various slots between the records you could create some kind of quasi diffuser I guess. But
Peter Comeau: The other one to mention which I forgot about is the big screen tv because that’s a huge area of glass and of course. Where are you going to put that? Between your speakers.
Andrew Hutchison: Just where you really don’t want it, I guess.
Peter Comeau: Yeah, so. So when you listen to your. When you’re listening to stereo and you’re not watching video, throw a blanket over it.
Andrew Hutchison: Do you, do you do that yourself? Peter, is a question I really should ask. because it’s
Peter Comeau: No, the TVs. The TVs at the opposite end of the room.
Andrew Hutchison: Ah. Ah. Okay. So no home cinema at your house?
Peter Comeau: no, we sort of gave up home cinema really. I think if I love home cinema. But I’d have it in another room if I was going to do it. Indeed I wouldn’t have it in my music room.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I have other questions but for the moment we’re going to take a two second break.
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What are your thoughts on those outrageously expensive drive units
I sort of left off with the expensive drive unit thing and, and I know I realized in the designs that you. In fact there’s two parts to this question, that the drive unit cost, it’s one of those, it feels like they, it blows out exponentially. And I did mentioning example the Scan-speakelipticor range, particularly the mid range, which is ultimately just a dome mid range but costs an enormous amount of money. Do you feel that there is. I mean, I guess it’s diminishing returns but what are your thoughts on those outrageously expensive drive units? And I guess you’re in a position at your company to build something very, very close for I imagine significantly less.
Peter Comeau: Well first of all, as a loudspeaker designer you should always be looking at new developments and Elipticor is one of the things that we’ve been working with on Scan-speak because we do use Scan-speak in our top of the line models. So it’s a very interesting technology. I think we will be using it in the future but we won’t be using it in their standard range, their super duper range. they’ve introduced Elipticor as a technology but they’ve also put it into their lux, what I call their luxury range of drive units. And when companies like us work with them, we can basically dictate the materials and everything that we want to use. and we do that with respect to cost. So because cost is an important thing for the brands that I’m managing. we’re not super high end, we don’t want to be super high end. the reason I don’t want to be super high end by the way is because I like to get my products into the hands of as many people as possible. I love the idea that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands in some cases for some products of people around the world are enjoying music more because they’re using my designs. So the idea of building something that costs $100,000 is a bit of an anathema to me because it means that I’m probably only going to sell one or two a month. that’s not really where I want to be.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no. I guess you’re philosophically. Well you’ve just stated your case. You’d prefer to have more of your good sounding loudspeakers in more hands
00:30:00
Andrew Hutchison: than just a, just a few examples spread thinly around the world. and I guess do you have much of a feeling on the diminishing returns thing? I mean is, I mean, I mean clearly this is the case. I mean in fact walking around Munich this year from room to room and I made in a two second conversation, that we had, I made the comment which you won’t remember but I made the comment that it was like a breath of fresh air to walk into a, a more affordable room. And I, and, and I, and I wasn’t really sure why. and I wonder whether it partly goes back to what we discussed previously with coloration. I don’t know, I’m not suggesting higher end more expensive products are colored but, but there was something, maybe I was just relaxed. The fact, ah, that my wallet could actually afford the products that were in your room and a couple of the other more affordable rooms that I went into. Maybe I just relaxed and was in a, I don’t know, was mentally in a, in a Better state for enjoying the music because I could actually afford the products playing. But there’s something very nice, very balanced, very easy to listen to about. Well, the, the new Evos that we’re playing that was just nice to walk into and away from some of the sometimes.
Do you have thoughts on the super high end? Um, well,
Well, I don’t know, I wouldn’t use the word coloured in relation to the super high end, but do you have thoughts on the super high end?
Peter Comeau: well, first of all let’s look at cost because if you’re going to be making one or two products a month, then it’s got to cost a lot of money in order to cover A your research and development, B the fact that your manufacturing facility is not working flat out.
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.
Peter Comeau: so add to that the cost of the materials, the drive units and so on that go in to these products and you can understand why they are so expensive. But in terms of what happens at these financials, I actually follow the edict that was given to me by Ivor Tiefenbrun of Linn Products back in the day when I was a journalist because when he first started sending the Linn LP12, it was partnered with the Grace G-707 tonearm and Supex 900E cartridge.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: And I still think to this day that a more musical combination has yet to be achieved.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: but I asked him, how did you discover these products? How did you know that they would work with your turntable? Did you go around the world trying out different tone arms and different cartridges until you found them? And he said no. He said it’s quite easy. I walk down the corridors of shows and when I’m passing an open doorway, if I hear a noise coming out, I’ll walk on. If I hear music coming out, I’ll go in and find out and try and figure out what it is that’s, that’s making that music.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: Okay. And, and that, that’s a strategy that I think works even today. By coincidentally, my wife and daughter were over at Munich high end last year.
Peter Comeau: And they spent, they spent some time obviously in the in the IG room and then went around the exhibition and they came back a couple of hours later with a very puzzled look on their faces. Yeah, I said, I said, what’s up? They said how come every room sounds worse than yours now? I mean, okay, there’s some personal bias in there. well maybe a little, but. Yeah, yeah, but I think the reason that you felt comfortable when you walked into our room is that we were playing music we weren’t playing hi Fi.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I sort of feel that’s. Well, okay, here’s my take. And you might be able to add a. A certain amount of technical theory to, to my experience, and that is that, I. I do walk around as I’ve been going to Munich and other. Other shows. You know, the, the obviously Vegas, back in the days when it was more of a hi Fi thing. And, you do skip past a lot of rooms. Yeah, that’s. Yeah. You know, you sort of. You literally hear a bit of sound leaking out the door. Now this, to some casual listeners is going to sound a bit dismissive, but it’s really not. Because if you’ve been to enough shows, you. You don’t have time really to. To listen to every room, obviously. And you do become a bit dismissive and. But you discover some real gems. and the price is quite often high, but quite often very affordable. And it. There is. There is the. That’s the defining thing. There’s this, I guess we used the term previously, musicality or a naturalness of the sound, but there’s a rightness to the sound, and it draws you in and you go into the room and it washes over you and it’s, It’s. It’s delightful. And the price isn’t the arbiter of that experience, I think.
Peter Comeau: Yeah, the. It’s feeling comfortable that I think is the main thing. I mean, you know, we go back to what I said in part one, that if. If you’re not feeling comfortable, you can’t enjoy the music. And, you know, there’s a. There’s a lot of. There’s a lot of product designed, which is designed for what I would call audiophile sensibilities.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: The sort of people who, if you go around to their house, they’ll play you 30 seconds of one track and then they’ll go, oh, listen to the drums on this. And they’ll play you another 30 seconds, another track. But they’ll never play an album. all the way through.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: that’s a different type of customer.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: And those people that. I see them coming to the rooms, demonstration rooms that we have, and they do what I call the audiophile pose. They sit in the chair and they lean forward, and if they could, they put their hands behind their ears, but they’re looking forward with this intense concentration on their face. And I can almost know what they’re thinking. They’re trying to separate out what the bass is like, what the mid range is like, what the treble is like, yeah. And with my designs I put a lot of effort into making sure you can’t hear those things. I want the whole speaker to be a complete whole speaker. It doesn’t, it’s not separated into three bands like that. You know, it just plays music and after a while they sit back and they’re looking really confused and at that point they’ll either get up and walk out or they’ll hopefully begin to enjoy the music. But it does confuse people because very often when you walk into rooms which are dedicated to the audio file, the treble will be extremely finely etched and detailed and will rip your ears off if you’re in there for more than ten minutes. the mid range will be cutting edge to a point where, you know, it doesn’t sound like people singing, it sounds like some awful stuff. Walk down the telephone. But it’s, it’s, it’s this finely etched, extremely present, forced presentation that seems to get audio files excited. and that, that’s fine for them. If they want that, that’s great, go and, go ahead and buy it, that’s great. But having, you know, this doesn’t, this doesn’t happen to every high end. There are high end designers out there who are doing a really, really good job. even with such things which seem ridiculous, like high end ducks, you know, they actually do work because the people who are designing them, they’re going after the music and they understand that and that’s, that’s great. So you know, I’m not, I’m not condemning all high end.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Peter Comeau: It’s just that some, some of the things which I try and listen to because people say, oh, you must go and listen to this. you know, I just find. Well, it’s not for me.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, and, and look, there is a little bit of personal taste in it I guess. But then that is the choice of the the audio file. If they, if they want to pursue that, I guess that’s, that’s fine. and but if you’re a music lover, you really just want a system that I feel that plays music.
There seems to be more horn loaded loudspeakers in the audio home audio space
Moving on from, from that, I appreciate your input on that but, but, and part of perhaps an extension of that commentary or conversation is, is horn loaded loudspeakers which I mean historically were, historically were always of course for throwing, you know, louder sounds down a giant auditorium. But there seems to be more and more horn loaded loudspeakers in the audio home audio space. I mean there’s a few historical players like the Klipsche’s of the world who have always done it. But. But I’ve noticed they seem to be sounding better. Maybe my ears have gotten old and I’m less sensitive to some of the, what I would correctly, otherwise, incorrectly or correctly call colorations. But do you have any thought on horns? I mean, are they something that you, you’ve heard some that you like? Because they, when they get it right, they do have this kind of. I don’t know, they have a certain way about them which is very enjoyable and relaxing.
Peter Comeau: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll tell you another little story about, When I was in retail, I was doing the Ibatif and BL sing and walking around shows and I passed by one door and there was some absolutely fantastic music coming out. So I went in. Really strange demo. I couldn’t. I looked at it and I couldn’t understand it. But Paul was some enormous speakers in the corner of the room. And then in the middle was this little tiddly valve amplifier with a couple of tubes. And I thought, what the hell is this? Because it was really sounding, you know, very enjoyable.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: I walked up to the guy and I said,
00:40:00
Peter Comeau: what. What have you got playing here? And he said, oh, this is the Klipsch corner horn.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.
Peter Comeau: And I said, and you know, I, I’d heard horns before and discounted them completely. And I said, oh, well, this is working really well for a horn system. So they explained a bit about it. And then I said, well, what’s, what’s this amplifier you’re driving it with? He said that it’s a, 2 watt single blended tuban. Who wants. He said, yeah, because these speakers are so sensitive.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: And what that gives you is, what, what the speaker sensitivity gives you is a tremendous dynamic range.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: And the reason for that is because you’re not stressing the amplifier. In fact, you’re not stressing any of the components. So I have a lot of time for that. But I felt that the reason the this was a very, early Klipsh corner speaker is. I don’t know how it compares to the ones that they’ve been producing more recently. But yeah, when it was under Paul Klipsch, it was done really well. but I don’t know quite what a lot of the current horn designers are aiming at because they all seem to be designing freestanding horns. And that seems to me like you’re trying to battle against room acoustics rather than using. You know, the great thing about the Klipsch corner horn. Was that the horn. The horn extended into the room? The room was the extension of the horn.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah.
Peter Comeau: And I think that’s, that’s, that’s a great way to go. And if I was going to design a horn, that’s where I’d start as a corner horn.
Andrew Hutchison: So. Okay, so your retirement gift to yourself is, a Peter Comeau version of a Klipsch corner horn. Is that my takeaway from that?
High sensitivity amplifiers make for cleaner sound, one assumes
Peter Comeau: I’d like to give it a go just to see what would happen. It would involve a lot of work because. So I know next to nothing about horn design. And you’re right, they are getting better. You know, some of the stuff that JBL is doing now is, pretty good. still think I got it wrong. And then marrying horns to normal base units. If you’re going to do the horn thing, then go all out for this high sensitivity because.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Peter Comeau: Because you think that’s where you, that’s where you really benefit.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So the sensitivity is an important part of the equation. So you’re really aiming for, you know, 95 decibels or something like that.
Peter Comeau: Oh, more than that. More than that, please. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, really?
Peter Comeau: Yeah, yeah. Because. Because the other thing I found out when. Because obviously, you know, work with the amplifier designers, ah, at iog and work very close with. With Jana, another designer for Quadrant Audio Lab. And a long time ago, one of when. When I was working, producing my own amplifiers for Haybrook. Not m their own designs, but we manufactured them to, Tim Deparovicini’s designs.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: one of the things that I found out was that the, the reason that you can get away with a, a 15 watt tube amplifier. You call them tubes in Australia, right?
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, no, we’re happy with tube. Well, I think historically, back when valves were actually the way that you, you know, amplified sound, before transistors, people were calling them valves. But tubes now seems to be the, the popular term.
Peter Comeau: Yeah. Ah, we still call them valves in the uk, But I think, I think that’s with the only ones. yeah. So 15 watt tube, amp, you could use it up to its absolute maximum and it wouldn’t ever betray itself. M. But with solid state amps, as the power goes up, they get worse.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: And my general feeling is that most solid state amps are only usable over the first third of their. Their capability. push them beyond that and they begin to harden up.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: And change character. not all of them do that. We’ve recently done or rather Yann has done with my, feeding in information from the original quad 303. The original quad 303. Peter Walker and others came up with this concept of the quad triples, which was a three, stages coupled to the output stage. So it was driver, pre driver and output transistors all coupled into one close unit
00:45:00
Peter Comeau: group, which they called the output triple stage.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: And the great thing about that was that all the feedback was localized around it. So it was self governing, if you like.
Peter Comeau: And the incredible thing about that is it doesn’t change character as you. so that was an interesting exercise to go through, but generally, yeah, if you can, if you can put less stress on all your components, whether it’s amplifier components or speaker components, everything sounds, I think, sounds much better. Much more relaxed and everything, everything behaves better.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter Comeau: Keeping. That’s the advantage you get with horns.
Andrew Hutchison: Keeping. Yeah, keeping excursion, I guess down to you know, to like you say, you know, perhaps a quarter or a third of its ultimate capability is got to make for cleaner sound, one assumes.
Peter Comeau: Yeah. Everything’s working in a more linear fashion.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yeah, yeah.
Your job at iag is Director of Acoustic Design
I, I guess this is going off at a tangent a little bit. I’ve got two tangents that I want to hit you with. One is, your job, official, official title if you like, at iag, is Director of Acoustic Design. some people listening might wonder, including myself, what do you do all day? Because I feel like the bit of the job that you really love must be being handed a clean piece of paper and we want to, we want to do this, and then you let your imagination run wild. But I do wonder how much of a day, where do you really get to ponder new designs and, and work on existing designs that you’re improving or what have you and how much is boring paperwork and writing reports and you know, that kind of thing. I mean, I mean it must be the best job in the world is, is the way I think of it.
Peter Comeau: Well, I think it is. But then, you know, I wouldn’t be doing it at the age I am now if it wasn’t for the fact that I love it. Because my, my idea all through my life ever since I left university was if, if a job ends ever up feeling like work, then I change. My job used to drive my parents crazy because I, you know, leave one job after another. But, I’ve ended up in a job that I absolutely adore. Yeah, that’s why I keep doing it.
You work with a marketing department who are very focused on what customers want
Anyway, Come back to your question. first of all, I don’t ever get a clean sheet of paper.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: Because we. We have to work with a marketing department who are, very hot on keeping up with what the customer wants.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay?
Peter Comeau: So we, we know within each brand or other. They know within each brand, you know, where things are going, what the customer’s looking for. And, we talk and talk and talk about that, in order to come up with new ideas, new concepts for, new products. And occasionally, you know, I’ll throw in an oddity like the original the Wharfdale 80th anniversary, Denton, which led to the Linton, which led to the Dovetail and so on, and the whole Heritage series, and. And that came out of just my brainstorming. But generally, it’s. Where can we take our customer who’s looking for a certain something? What can we offer them that gives them something new and exciting? so that’s where the designs come from. And then it’s really down to, okay, what can we put into these designs which is more advanced than what we’ve done before? What have we learned over the past couple of years? Because, you know, two to three years is the general life, the product, that helps us make more advances. And, most of that we do through listening, discussion and research. And it’s all good fun. It’s all good fun.
Andrew Hutchison: I’m pretty sure it is. but it must mean that you’re incredibly busy. There’s such a broad range of models and, in fact, brands as well. Why have we got. Sorry about the phone message coming through. It’s. I mean, and the. And then the second sort of offered a tangent thing is that Castle is a brand that I, I would imagine you’re responsible for as well. Is that right?
Peter Comeau: yes. that’s what I’m working on now, actually.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Well, that’s. Maybe it’s a. You know, we didn’t. I’m sorry about the phone noises. We’ll edit that out so I’ll re. Mention you can’t hear. Yeah, it’s frustrating. so, yeah, look.
So Castle acoustics. I do remember, Castle, because I reviewed them
So Castle acoustics. I feel, Do you have a sort of. I mean, my question is really, if you’re working on a castle, do you have an old pair of castles kicking around or something you buy
00:50:00
you and you analyze sort of. Or do you know from memory perhaps what that product kind of sounded like and the way it was back in the day and the kind of customer that wanted that sound. And then you sort of try to, I guess, Build that into a new version of that. That sort of, character, if you like. Is that, Is that part of the job?
Peter Comeau: Very much the case. I do. I do remember, Castle, because I reviewed them, when I was a journalist and, talked to the designers about them, so I know where they’re coming from. the two pastor speakers are out there now, the Earl and the Duke, who actually, I brought in, Carl Heinz, good friend of mine, Carl Heinz Fink, who, works principally in Germany. But we’ve worked on lots of products before. And the reason we got to know each other was because we found that we had the same idea, about hi Fi.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: That it has to play music. So that’s great.
Andrew Hutchison: Sure.
Peter Comeau: he’s very accomplished designer, and we brought him in to do the Earl and the Duke. But I’m working on some stuff now myself.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: And. And. And trying to pick up on what, what Castle did in their quarter wave loading and further that on with, the way that we know how these things work now. So I’ve got a. A very talented assistant who’s, a real brainy guy. first class honors degree out of Southampton University. And.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: He’s done a lot of the maths behind the. Behind the theory.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: That Castle were working with, and we’ve come up with something interesting. So.
Andrew Hutchison: Is that months away or more of a year away? Kind of. I mean, what is the lead time in these things?
Peter Comeau: Yeah, I’m hoping it’s going to be this year.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: All right. Yeah, yeah. We’re going through the listening stages and fine tuning stages now. It’s never easy to tell you how long those are going to take.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Peter Comeau: because sometimes you can end up, sooning things, and we don’t release them until they’re ready. And sometimes it can take months to do that.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
From concept to prototype is normally six to nine months, Peter says
that reminds me of a story you were telling about, the mission products that you worked on during, Covid, where you started. Well, I think you. Your words were you had the luxury of a year or more, perhaps, but normally that would not be the case. The lead time, I guess, is. I mean, if you’ve got to try to get something designed and sorted out and passing the listening test within six months or something, is that sort of more than normal timeline or.
Peter Comeau: from concept to, signing off, the prototype is normally six to nine months.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: and, you know, we. We put a lot of thousands of hours of listening into. Into that time, obviously. because we have to get it.
Andrew Hutchison: Right Yeah, I will imagine you put thousands of hours of work in like, you know, like design and experimentation and you know, modeling I would imagine as well, maybe not thousands, I don’t know. I mean, is it thousands of hours, hours in each model?
Peter Comeau: it depends how quickly things come together. if we’re working with what I would call known technology, like for instance Evo 5, we just took the existing drive units out of Evo 4, refined them, added some new knowledge that we’d researched and materials that we’d researched and put that into it. But basically they were because we were working with drive units that we knew well, we, it cut down the development time, the listing time, but it’s still hundreds of hours went in there.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s. Yeah, it comes back to what you were making the comment about high end, low volume versus the more affordable products that IAG builds. and that the ability to, you know, spread the cost, if you like, of that R D, which is unavoidable no matter what kind of product you’re designing. There’s an enormous amount of time taken to get it right. And if you’re only selling like you say, a dozen pairs a year, it’s a substantial chunk of money, allocated to each pair. Whereas in your case where you, you know. Well, I have no idea of the volume I mean, but I presume thousands of pairs, you can spread the cost obviously and it’s a much smaller chunk of money per speaker. I’m going to take a quick break and get you back in a second to finish off on a couple of final questions, if that’s all right. Peter?
Peter Comeau: Fine by me.
Would you say that off axis speakers generally have good off axis performance
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00:55:00
Andrew Hutchison: Would you say that the loudspeakers that in history, everyone has endured have generally had, you know, good off axis performance or off axis balance that’s very similar to to the on axis. Is that, is that, do you think that’s how it is? Or is there some speakers that break that Rule. You know, we all know the classics.
Peter Comeau: There are always speakers that break that rule. But generally, yes, that’s the case. The ones that sound most natural and easygoing, comfortable to live with, the ones that do that, I mean this stuff was, was known in the 70s and 80s by speaker designers and then it was forgotten about for a long time. Then it reoccurred again. then people like Floyd o’ Toole and so on, resurrected it and made sure it was well known again. But it’s not something, it’s not a new invention. But what we do have now is better ways of measuring it, which is great.
Andrew Hutchison: Do you.
Peter Comeau: Yeah. the products that break with convention are the ones which I would fall only suited to particular types of music. If you want something that’s. If you want something that’s a hard hitting rock loudspeaker, you might not care about coloration. You’re more interested in dynamics and transients and something where the sound is being thrown at you rather than drawing you in what I would call drawing you into the music.
Andrew Hutchison: So you would say then that scenario we were talking about where you’re walking down the halls of a show and you hear something nice coming out. Do you think that that’s probably a system that has very even power response? Is that, is that a, Can we connect those two together?
Peter Comeau: I think you’d almost certainly find that. Yeah, yeah.
Anechoic chambers are very good in allowing you to come up with prototype
Andrew Hutchison: your facilities, at IAG one imagines an enormous anechoic chamber is at your disposal. But is that, is that still required or is that something you do have access to or is it just something that no longer is? You can use gated measurements. Using something like the Clippel system is, is even better. Or what, what do you, or do you use a combination of all of the above?
Peter Comeau: we use a combination. we have a Clipper system. We have several anechoic chambers.
Andrew Hutchison: Of course you do. You have several anechoic chambers.
Peter Comeau: Okay. Yes. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: How nice for you.
Peter Comeau: Some, some extremely large, some medium sized, some small.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: And and they give a different set of results. Results than the Clipper NFS system does. Because the clipple NSS system, it’s, it’s a tool like all tools. It’s, it’s really good at some things, but it’s extrapolating what something should work at, should, should perform like at 2 meters from very close measurement. And it is an extrapolation. It’s a computer simulation. whereas when you actually go and measure in a large anecdote chamber, what something’s behaving like at 2 meters, it does measure slightly differently.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: It’s an interesting contrast, but, yeah, you have to use this stuff. particularly the anechoic chambers are very good in allowing you to come up with your first prototype. So the way we design prototypes is we put everything together into m. A prototype speaker. we’ll go into the anecdote chamber, we’ll do a, huge range of measurements, and then we’ll put those into some very clever computer software. And, that would enable us to design our first crossover. We build that first crossover and we go into listening group.
Andrew Hutchison: Yep.
Peter Comeau: And sometimes it sounds, oh, yeah, this is what we can work with. And sometimes, my God, that’s awful. And we go back and start again. so, you know, this is. This is the way that design should work in that you’re using the tools at your disposal to help you to come up with something, which is a starting point.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: Trying to do it the other way around. I mean, I’ve been a reviewer. I know what it’s like. But trying to do it the other way around and that is do those measurements and then from that extrapolate whether something. It performs correctly is much more difficult.
Andrew Hutchison: And a question before I forget. you mentioned measuring at 2 meters. Is. Is that the advantage of the larger anechoic chambers, you can measure it to. Or even further away from the loudspeaker is.
Peter Comeau: Or is that you need. I, mean, we can. We can do measurements at 1 meter, and it will give us, it will give us
01:00:00
Peter Comeau: a certain set of results. But bear in mind that most listeners are, two to two and a half meters away from their speakers. So that’s really where you want to be measuring.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.
During COVID Australia had two sets of rules about washing hands
Peter Comeau: and really, you need a big. You need a big chamber.
Andrew Hutchison: I was going to say the only way to really. Is. Is it still. Am I completely out of touch with reality or is really the only way to measure it two or two and a half meters is to have an anechoic chamber. Is. And a substantial one. Is that. Is that right?
Peter Comeau: well, in Gilbert Briggs day, they used to hoist the speaker up on a crane.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Well, there is that method outside. You mean 10 meters of.
Peter Comeau: 10 meters above the ground?
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yes. Yeah, there is that.
Peter Comeau: It’s.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s less than convenient, though, isn’t it? So, it certainly is. You’d spend most of your day hoisting speakers up on cranes. and then, of course, I was.
Peter Comeau: Doing them when I was doing the Mission 770. During COVID Yeah, I had to do that. I was out in the garden.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh yeah, because. So you designed a lot of that sort of at home or something, did you?
Peter Comeau: yeah, yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: It all had to be done at home. We were under lockdown in the uk. I don’t know what you guys are doing in Australia.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, we were just out surfing and drinking beer. But it’s that’s not true at all. I mean, it depends actually. We don’t want to go sideways into Covid. But the funny thing with COVID is that Australia dissolved itself, you know, back to sort of a pre federation scenario where the states were at war with each other and each state had a different set of rules. And I just happened to live in the wild west of Australia, which is not the west, but the equivalent of Texas or something, which is Queensland. And we had no rules really, except that we weren’t allowed to go over to New South Wales. So there was this sort of barricade at the border. But largely we did whatever we wanted. And to be honest, I didn’t miss a day’s work. So I just went in every day as per normal. in Victoria on the other hand, they shut the state down for two years and kind of ruined it forever. obviously UK had the same set of rules all the way around.
Peter Comeau: Uk, UK had had one set of rules which was complete lockdown.
Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?
Peter Comeau: I remember having, I remember having Christmas dinner with my youngest daughter and husband. They were sitting outside in the freezing cold. We had the doors open to the extension of our kitchen which has double doors out onto a patio. They were sitting out there and we were sitting inside. That’s the ridiculous of it. However, it seems that looking back on it, that there weren’t one set of rules, there were two set of rules. There was another set of rules for.
Andrew Hutchison: The politicians, I was going to say the Prime Minister at the time, who were partying away. Yeah.
Peter Comeau: But the astonishing is, thing was for us was we went over to visit our, eldest daughter who’s living in Copenhagen.
Peter Comeau: and it was like going back into freedom again. They, they had the two meter rule, but that was it. Two meters and masks.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: You could do anything you like.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it was a, it was a. It. There was a lot of variances in the rules and there was a lot of variances in the success of these different rules. And I’m not sure that any conclusions can be drawn, but one conclusion I can draw is that People have forgotten about spreading those sort of, it’s not really a disease, perhaps, but I mean, the whole virus on a plane thing, we’re back to where we were pre. Covered, I think There seems to be.
Peter Comeau: Well, to a certain extent. I mean, there’s two. The two things that I think came out of it. one is wash hands all the time. Every time you go outside. When you come back in, first thing, wash your hands. If you shake hands with somebody, for God’s sake, get to the toilet and wash your hands as quickly as you can. That’s, that’s. That’s one of the rules that I still follow. The other one, which, interestingly enough, still happens in China, was happening in China before. It’s happening in Japan before. That is if you feel sick, if you have a cold, wear a mask.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah.
Peter Comeau: Your mask is there not to prevent you from catching something. No, it does work, but your mask is mainly there to stop you.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: Getting your germs.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: Your disease to other people. And, people in. The. People in Asia have known this for decades.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Peter Comeau: They still do it.
Peter Bergen: Many Asian people travelling with masks on
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed. Yes. Because you’d be at airports and you’d see, well, depending where the airport is, I guess. But there’s certainly many, Asian people, travelling. Well, living in Asia and travelling with masks on. And. And I guess I think I always felt that was to protect themselves. But if it’s to protect others, then, well, that’s great as well. And it’s a very generous thing to do. But on, that recent trip, you know, to Germany, there was. There’s no masks being worn anywhere. And, And, you know, annoyingly, I
01:05:00
Andrew Hutchison: managed to catch a cold yet again. Not Covid. That I’m aware of, but, you know, it’s. It’s just, Anyhow, we’ve covered politics back to audio. Just, glad it’s over, really. And I hope we don’t see anything like that again soon. look, we’ll probably wrap up shortly, Peter. I think that, I’m going to postpone some of my questions to a time in the future when you’re back in the UK and we’ve got slightly cleaner Internet reception. I really appreciate, your time, this time. my pleasure.
One thing that bugs me about IAG is people don’t take expensive speakers seriously
one final question, actually, I mean, you’ve caught. You sort of already answered it, and that is that it seems like IAG philosophically will never enter into the. The high end, if you like, but. Or is there a secret project lurking somewhere that you dabble with in Your spare time. That’s a. More of a, a sort of an all out effort using the incredible. I mean you’ve got these enormous and you’ve got at least one enormous anechoic chamber. You’ve got obviously a fantastic you know, woodworking factory, cabinet factory, all sorts of drive unit building capability, either in house or subcontracted out or what have you. You could as a group certainly build, one would assume a very, very competitive high end product. Is it on the radar?
Peter Comeau: well, let me approach it from a different direction because it’s one of the things that really bugs me and that is people do not take what a lot of products that our brands do, they do not take them seriously because they are not expensive.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: And that drives me crazy because we, for example when, when introduced, when we introduced Elysium for Wharfedale, which was probably probably the most expensive product that Wharfedale had done for a long time.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: I remember taking it, going to one of the tours I did to demonstrate. This was in Germany. And at one high end store in Germany, we put the top of the range, the Elysian Falls on, driven by some tube amps and customers were just coming in to this evening do and having some snacks and drinks and sitting down with a glass of wine and listening to music and it was great. Everybody was having a great time. The speaker sounded fantastic, very musical. This whole system was very musical and it was thoroughly enjoyable. And then halfway through the evening the store owner said, can I have a word? I said yeah, sure. And he took me outside. He took me into another of his den rooms.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: And he, he looked around and he said peter, what do I do with all these speakers now? I said what do you mean? He said well you’re playing, you’re playing something which sounds absolutely incredible for a third of the price.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Peter Comeau: Of what I’m looking at, in this Denver. He said but how am I supposed to sell them? I said look, you’re probably going to be selling on brand name anyway because people do that, right. They come in and they go, I want a pair of JBLs or I want a pair of focals.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Peter Comeau: they’re not, you know, they don’t come in and ask for a pair of wolf turtles. And that’s. That for me is a big problem because we do like to push boundaries. We are going to be pushing boundaries, for Wharfedale we are going to go more expensive.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Peter Comeau: but it’s still going to be, it’s still going to be what I would call affordable. We’re not going to go crazy.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no, but it does, it does.
Peter Comeau: Annoy me that for example in Wharfedale, the Elysian series and the Aura series in particular, which I think are phenomenal performance to their price, don’t get taken seriously because they are not expensive enough. And that’s crazy because what we’re doing at IAG is we’re bringing the economy of building things to a high performance but at a reasonable price to the marketplace so that like I said, we can get as many speakers into as many homes as possible. so please do take seriously when we do this stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I, I you know, secretly as someone who’s, you know, got a love for affordable mid price products such as you know, Spendor, proac, neat. And you know, not just not to sound like some, a snob who will only listen to a product that’s made in the UK or of course an Australia made loudspeaker or American made loudspeaker or a German made loudspeaker. But I mean, I guess that the Chinese manufacture is, is something some people would still cling to. But the Elysian Elysium loudspeakers are. I mean they’re embarrassingly exceptional. I
01:10:00
Andrew Hutchison: don’t want to sort of, you know, blow smoke in your back pocket or whatever the expression is. But it’s. I have heard them in a couple of different situations and they are genuinely a. I mean they are exactly what you say they are. They’re very musical, very natural, very plenty of dynamics and excitement and and in no way are they fatiguing to listen to. So a very accomplished design. But I guess they’ve still got a Wharfedale badge. So do you invent, does IAG invent their own brand?
Peter Comeau: No, launching a new brand. I mean we’ve got enough brands to work with anyway. Well, you kind of have new brand. This is. Launching a new brand is hell. It’s really, really difficult because you go to dealers and they go why, do I need another brand? I’ve got enough already. So you don’t want to do that. But like I say, we are always pushing boundaries with Wharfedale. We’re going to continue to do that. We’re going to go up in price and just see how the market reacts.
Andrew Hutchison: No, you heard it here first folks. Maybe you didn’t. But anyhow, Peter’s mentioned it, so I’ll go with that. Hey, thank you again, Peter Comeau for your Como. I believe we’re going to cover this. Correct pronunciation, as you prefer, is como.
Peter Comeau: Yeah, it’s an anglicised version, but, you know, I’m an Anglophile, so.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, anyhow, we know who you are either way and I thank you again for your time and your input and your thoughts and your philosophies. It’s very much appreciated and I’m, pretty sure people are going to enjoy sort of getting some insight into how these designs get, get, made, how they’re thought through. Thank you again, Peter, and I’d love to speak to you when you’re, back in the uk.
Peter Comeau: Okay. I’m now going to go and make myself a cup of coffee using one of your Australian designs, the Breville, espresso machine, which I think is absolutely brilliant and it’s been great talking to you.
Andrew Hutchison: Navita is. It’s, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you again.
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