Q&A: Todd Ryan, Sonance
The new Visual Performance (VP) series of in-wall speakers marks a new technological era for Sonance. Chief speaker engineer Todd Ryan talks to Paul Skelton about a lifetime of pushing the boundaries.
Paul Skelton (PS): How did you get started in loudspeaker design?
Todd Ryan (TR): I’ve had a lifelong interest in audio and loudspeakers, originally as a hobbyist. I started playing with speakers in my early teens and when I was in my 20s and going to college, I somewhat foolishly started my own speaker company.
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That turned into a company called Ryan Acoustics, which I owned with my brother for about eight years in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
When that closed I went to work for Sonance and have been there ever since. That was nearly 20 years ago.
PS: What drew you in to loudspeaker design?
TR: I think it was a fascination with the idea that loudspeakers feature what is quite possibly the least precise level of engineering of all the equipment in an audio system. So, it offers the most opportunity for the interpretation of what’s right and what’s wrong.
I think this really drew me in because, as a designer, I can have a greater influence on the sound of the product then I could with, say, an amplifier or CD player.
PS: Why do you think you’ve been so successful at this?
TR: I think a lot of it can be put down to my sheer fascination with speakers – it’s all I’ve been interested in since I was a kid.
I also think that my interest in the higher end part of the industry has helped dramatically. I may work at Sonance and design speakers for a living but I’m still interested in audio as a hobby. And I believe the sound quality you hear in the new VP range is a reflection of someone who listens to high-end speakers that aren’t just in-walls.
PS: Do you spend much time listening to the in-wall speakers that other manufacturers produce?
TR: Yes. If someone out there builds a better speaker than me, I want to know how they did it.
I listen to other people’s speakers as objectively as possible and try to pick out the parts that sound good. If, for example, someone has a speaker that produces bass better than mine I want to know why.
PS: In regard to your speaker designs, what is left for you to achieve?
TR: A lot of engineers say that the best product they’ve designed is the next one. I try to be the type of person that never really gets too far ahead of myself; I always push myself to keep going and to never see the work that I’ve done as being the pinnacle of my career.
There is so much more ahead of me that I can achieve.
For example, we’ve just finished the redesign of the VP series but we’re already looking at what we can do next. It might take another eight years before we find something better, but it’s still out there.
I want to keep moving forward. I want to try new cone materials and find new ways to perfect the drivers and crossovers. And I want to find ways to make our speakers even easier to install.
Ultimately, that’s my goal. I want to make each new generation of Sonance speakers even better than the last.
PS: When new speakers are launched, it’s rare to find any drastic advancement in terms of technology; rather, it seems to be refinement of existing technology. Do you see this changing?
TR: It’s true that the speaker industry hasn’t really changed that much in the past 40 years or so. There have been many improvements to the materials used in speaker construction and there is far more sophisticated test equipment available now, which means we can test what is happening with woofers and tweeters in finer detail. But, I don’t see a huge shift in speaker design happening in the foreseeable future.
A lot of new companies come into the industry claiming they have some great new product but time often proves that that is little more that marketing fluff. It’s not real science. For that reason, I think the changes that will occur in the next 40 years will be gradual improvements to what already exists.
PS: You mention improvements to the materials used in cone, tweeter and woofer construction. Which materials do you like to employ?
TR: Right now, the cone materials we’re using in the new VP series are making us very happy. We’ve actually laminated two dissimilar materials together to get the best properties of both materials.
In the case of the Performance Level 8 products, we use a laminate of carbon fibre and a structural foam material called Rohacell. By combining those two cone materials together you come up with a really rigid material that doesn’t have the same break-up problems that you typically hear in carbon fibre by itself.
I think this is where Sonance is making a lot of improvements over what a lot of other companies are producing.
PS: Some sectors of the loudspeaker industry are quite competitive and overrun with product. Are there any sectors that you believe to be untapped?
TR: I honestly believe we’ll see a lot of new speakers designed for applications that people haven’t thought of yet, whatever that happens to be.
Over the past 10 years, speakers are being released for applications that you typically wouldn’t have thought would be very popular, like the outdoors.
I think, instead of technology itself changing, it will be the application that changes.
PS: So, what’s next for Sonance?
TR: From a performance standpoint, I really want to extend the improvements we’ve made to the VP series across the entire product line.
We’re applying the improvements to everything that we make moving forward.
It’s such a quantum leap forward in performance for this product category and it offers people a product that they will be happy listening to for years and years.
PS: Is there an end point whereby you simply can’t improve on your speakers any further?
TR: I don’t think so. Knowing what real acoustic music sounds like, there’s always room to move forward.
Reproduced audio is still reproduced audio. There’s a barrier that will never be crossed but there are enough areas for improvement that will keep the industry moving forward.
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