June 5, 2007
ListenUp: How did NHT get started?
Chris Byrne: I worked retail for a long time. I started at Pacific Stereo and that’s when I really got into audio. I’d been sort of a hobbyist before that but not really a high-end guy. I just loved music so much that I got into audio.
A couple of things really did it for me, I think. The first thing was I had a factory rep come in and I heard imaging for the first time and I was just absolutely blown away by it. I didn’t think this was possible. We all know what it is at this point, but I don’t think many consumers know what it is. That was one of the things about loudspeakers that got me interested. I became a buyer at Pacific and I started taking products home. Before I’d buy anything from anyone I’d take it home and evaluate it just to see how it worked in the home, get women’s opinions, things like that. And I could never find a speaker I could live with for very long — unless you really wanted to spend a huge amount of money. This was in the early ‘70s.
The other thing I noticed was there was this dichotomy between — I hesitate to say male and female, because it’s not always that case. But there was one person that was looking for performance and the other person in the pair was going, “It had better fit in my house,” long before custom, obviously. And nobody was doing that. They weren’t doing a combination of something that was attractive, small, and sounded good. And that’s what gave me the idea to do this.
I had been at Pioneer after I’d left retail and I’d been at Akai and I’d finally just sort of had it with large companies. We started NHT and I found a guy by the name of Ken Kantor. Kenny had been the director of advanced research and development at AR. That’s why our speakers are sealed boxes — that comes from that heritage, that East Coast sound thing.
Ken had this odd little speaker that he’d actually designed for Proton as a consultant. If you remember our first speakers had a cut on them — they were angled in. And Proton hated it; they thought it was way too radical — “We can’t do this.” I looked at it and I said, “We can build a company around this. It’s great technology story and it looks good.” And so I bought the designs from him and he joined the company about three months later.
So we started to build a company. Our whole intent was to make a speaker as small as we could possibly make it, as high-performance as we could make it, and still try to keep the price points affordable. And I think when we started, in the mid-‘80s and through the ‘90s, there was that huge niche. It was Thiel and —
LU: Levinson.
CB: Yeah, Levinson. I mean, there was that ilk. And then there was the Japanese stuff and there was very little in the middle in those days. Adcom was doing really well and AD was doing well. There were a few speaker companies; Boston had kind of lost it at that point; they were going more mass market. And it was hard to start a company. We started about the same time Sandy did at Definitive and the guys at Paradigm — it was all sort of around the same time. And I think we were really the last three brands to get into the industry, each with a different approach. B&W was well on their way at that point. I think when we started B&W was probably doing about $20 million worldwide which, at the time, wasn’t a bad number.
And we just locked into that slot where people — there was a lot of interest, if you remember, in stereophile in those days — young people getting into the market. They couldn’t afford it so they started talking to each other. This was the birth of the forums — “If you can’t afford this, then buy an NHT.” That’s what we really got our reputation built on.
Then we started doing some kind of innovative stuff. I think we were one of the first companies with a full home theater system. We did dipoles, subwoofers, center channels, all of those things. We were video-shielded from day one in every product we made. Other people at that time were saying, “Here’s the audio version and here’s the video version.” And we just decided, “That’s stupid; this thing is headed towards the television set,” and we knew it. So we hit that particular part of the market.
We have attracted a very dedicated consumer base. People buy an NHT product and they tend to come back and buy another one. I think I’ve only, in my 20 years, refunded two pairs of speakers because guys didn’t like them.
LU: That’s a pretty great track record.
CB: One guy, I refunded his money and said, “Go buy Klipsch. Man, at the volumes you’re playing, I have nothing that you can’t blow up.” [laughter] So we’ve had a few of those things over the years, but overall a very satisfied customer base. And we’ve always tried to concentrate on truth in what we do sonically. I don’t know if you remember the Super Zero or not. That was one of our crowning products. We sold close to 600,000 Super Zeros. And that little Sub BSW 10; we caught that ride.
LU: Those were — ?
CB: The Supers were 9 inches by 5 by 5-1/2. And we were honest about that loudspeaker. One of the things — we did not enhance the bass in it. We told people, “If you’re looking for anything below 100 Hertz, buy a subwoofer because you’re not going to get it. But above 100 Hertz, we’ll compare this against $5,000 loudspeakers.” It was that pristine.
So our attitude has always been kind of like a sports car, if you will. We’re not going to make apologies for the road, we’re not going to make this a nicer experience. But if you want accuracy, this is what we’re going to give you. Try and be as true to what is on the recording as possible. And that’s what sort of drove it and has driven it, I think, for 20 years.
A love of music
LU: A lot of the guys in the company have a musical background.
CB: Yes, they do.
LU: How about you?
CB: Yes, but much lower level than some of the guys. We’ve got a couple of real pros in the company. But yeah, I think that’s one of the things that gravitated people to the company. We never went out looking to hire anybody; they just sort of showed up at the front door. And you either liked the place when you walked in or you didn’t, and we seem to attract a lot of music people.
When we design a product at NHT, we have a pretty large group that signs off on it. No one person makes a final call on it. We send people home with the prototypes. And it’s that musical involvement. We’re always bringing in new music — “Try this out, try that one out.” So it’s very much a music-based culture as opposed to a commercially based culture.
LU: Weren’t you were a roadie at one point?
CB: I was. I was a roadie for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.
LU: Oh, wow — “The Cover of Rolling Stone”?
CB: Exactly. Right at that time, as a matter of fact. I’d just gotten back from Vietnam and a friend of mine called me up and said, “Do you want to go on the road?” and I said, “Sure.” I was really lucky; it was a great time. We toured with Leon Russell and Frank Zappa and did a little bit with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. We were always the front act, but it was a year and a half of kind of pain, in a way, because they were a real road band. I mean, after a while, you just get so tired, being out there. But, yeah, just more of a musical involvement. I actually turned down a career at CBS Records; they’d offered me a job in A&R and I passed on it. I’d met a woman and I decided I was going to go back and get married and finish school.
The Classic Series
LU: Tell us a little bit about the Classic series.
CB: The Classic series is really an extension of the very first line that we came out with. And we’ve done this over the years; we’ve improved on it. The original was a Model 1 and a Model 1.5 and then there was the 2 and the 2.5. Audio-based loudspeakers, for the most part, although nothing is entirely that any longer. So our adaptations have been in that sort of primary mix-and-match box line, which is what Classic is. We’ve always tired to maintain the two-channel values that are really important to us. But at the same time, it’s a home theater world. And how do you adapt that? In the ‘90s, we had two series — we had home theater and we had audio — and it’s just not practical any longer. So there was that element of it. The other element of it was cosmetics; let me deal with the performance issues first. One of the first things we noticed was that we had to drop the angle, which was sort of our signature, because when you put them around TVs you get these horrible reflections. It doesn’t work properly.
And another thing we noticed, in general — while there are a few of us that still sit down between a pair of loudspeakers and listen, most people don’t. They’re listening in various places in the room, particularly the theater people; they’re spread out. So we began to incorporate three-way designs back into the product. We’d always been a two-way company. But when you look at theater, three-way becomes really important, because it gives you much broader horizontal dispersion. It gives you the ability to put stuff horizontally or vertically without changing the dispersion patterns. So we did that in the Classic series with the Three and the Four, and both center channels.
We didn’t feel it was so necessary in the Absolute Zero and the Two; we figured those were going to be in smaller systems. But the bigger systems, we figured, were going to be more home-theater centered. That’s the fundamental difference between this version of Classic; before, we had something called Super Audio. And you’re starting to see more three-way designs in what we do, particularly in our architectural stuff. Same thing — it’s an issue of how much dispersion, where people are listening today.
We’ve always been kind of an application-based company. So we’re always trying to figure out what the consumer need is and then adapt our products to it without giving up our standards. We have a benchmark of what we’ll do in performance, and we just won’t go below that. So that’s really where Classic came. I think Classic’s fundamentally our last sort of traditional set of loudspeakers; or at least for some period of time. We’re beginning to look more at system solutions, which I think is becoming increasingly important, particularly at retail consumers.
Next page
Return to NHT Partner Store
|
