Brent Butterworth

Speaker makers fall into two general groups: the Canadian school and the artsy school. The Great White Northerners — guided by decades of study conducted at the Canadian National Research Council in Ottawa — fuss and fuss until their speakers deliver perfect measured performance, then run test after test with trained listeners to make sure their speakers sound practically flawless.

I don't know who said, "You can never be too rich or too thin," but it wasn't a speaker engineer. Thinness is the enemy of good sound because in order to produce sound, a diaphragm of some sort has to move back and forth. The lower the frequency of sound, the farther back and forth that diaphragm has to move.

One of my favorite things about the audio biz is that anyone with a dream and a garage can get in. Accumulate the knowledge to design a speaker or an amp, gather the tools and materials to build it, muster the courage and social skills to sell it, and you’ve got yourself an audio company! (Unfortunately, a few would-be entrepreneurs skip that all-important first step.)

There’s no better current example of this phenomenon than John DeVore, founder, president, and chief designer of DeVore Fidelity. DeVore was a musician and high-end stereo salesman in new York City who’d nurtured a hobby of building his own speakers. When he finally got to the point where he was satisfied with his designs, he started to produce and sell them. His company now builds speakers in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has become a hotbed of artisanal manufacturing.

Lots of companies make cars. Lots of companies make video projectors. But when you look under the hood of either product, you'll realize that not many companies make engines - i.e., the piston engines that power cars and the light engines that power projectors. That still leaves plenty of things to do like add a body, decide which features should accompany the engine, and sometimes tweak the engine to better suit individual needs.