LU: Can you describe a little bit of your R&D operation? You do most of it out in California?
CB: Yes; we do the R&D in California, but we have most of our stuff actually built offshore, in a variety of different places. We’ve never made our own drivers. I mean, you do what you do best and don’t try and be all things. So we’ve always done all of our own driver design and we do ground-up driver design. We do all of the cabinet design but we do have it manufactured in other places. Sometimes the drivers come from Europe; for years they came from Japan and Taiwan and now more of them coming from China. That’s not a bad thing as long as you qualify the vendor. There are some very good driver manufacturers over there. Most of them that come from Japan or Taiwan or even Europe are starting to manufacture there.
So, yes, we do all of that design — we design nothing in an anechoic environment. We have two sound rooms in our lab — and we’ve done this for 15 years. One is built on what would simulate a house foundation off the ground — wood floors and eight-foot ceilings and the typical stuff. One of them is more of a square room because they cause problems. One is a much larger room, slab floors, vaulted ceilings — just to get some sense of the sound in the space. We’ve always done our designs in rooms, because we need to hear what our speakers are going to sound like.
LU: In the real world…
CB: Yes. We take them back and forth between both rooms and we’ll do measurements there. And then we send them home with people, also, before we sign off on designs.
We’ve got a small cadre of acoustic engineers — I think some of the best in the business — that really understand the parameters. Our attitude has always been, “Look, this might be cooler in a cross-over, this part might be, but it costs $4 more. If we can’t measure the difference, we won’t put it in.” That’s just one of those approaches that we’ve always taken. We try to keep our cost down, spend the money on the stuff that matters. And the stuff that doesn’t, we don’t spend it on.
Cosmetics we haven’t addressed very much, as we have our own in-house industrial designer. He’s been with us now about 10 years. He doesn’t always do the design, but he always manages it. Sometimes you need a fresh look of something so we’ll take it outside. But I think that’s one of the reasons that NHT’s always had sort of a unique look is that we don’t do a sort of traditional design. We do some pretty wacky things, actually.
Amped about amps
LU: What do you think is the most important ingredient to getting good sound in a home — in a real-world environment?
CB: Decent electronics. There still is a reason to step up to a high quality amplifier and I don’t think that people understand that. All you’ve got to do is go into your Denver store and turn on an $800 Denon or a $500 Sony and then put on the Rotel piece that might be $1200 and you’ll say “Wow — there is a real difference.”
And I think part of that’s being driven just by the number of features that people have to put in. The features have gotten expensive. HDMI is not cheap to implement. So where does the cost come out? It’s coming out of amplifiers. And that affects sound in the home. So I think consumers have to be — they don’t have to be ridiculous; there are still lots of values out there. But going for the lowest price, they’re generally doing themselves a disservice, I think.
LU: Do you think people get caught up in the specs, too? I think a lot of people just don’t know the difference. They say, “Well, if it does 100 watts per channel — what’s the difference between this one that does 100 watts per channel and this one that does—?” They get caught up in the idea that more must be better, instead of understanding those specs are sometimes inflated anyway —
CB: Well, yes. And they’re rated at two channels; they’re often not rated at all channels driven and it’s a five-channel amplifier. We’ve done our own measurements and there’s a lot of stuff coming from overseas that claims to be 100 watts a channel, and with all channels driven, it’s actually in the 40-watt range. People don’t realize that. And unfortunately, our trade industry doesn’t enforce decent standards, I think, that really make people report things the same way so a consumer can really compare them.
LU: So you would really recommend making that step up to better amplification?
CB: Well, I think it’s combination. This is a segue back to ListenUp — it’s also a combination of where you go to buy. Go to buy from some place that knows what they’re talking about. There still is enough unknown out there that I don’t think you can just walk into a Best Buy and pick something off a shelf.
LU: Well, you can’t hear it, anyway.
CB: Yeah, and be assured of what you have. And that’s one of the things — I mean, I was playing in your sound room yesterday with a Verve system, just going between different surround receivers. The differences are remarkable. And the current that’s supplying, I think that’s a big difference. In the Rotel, it may not stay higher power, but they’ve got some head room in it. And when you get that demand, it’s there — I think that’s important. As far as loudspeakers, I think people just have to decide what they want to accomplish first, and stick with brands they know, be that in an NHT or be it a B&W or be it a Paradigm.
Read the reviews. Most of them are pretty real, I think. That’s the one area of the audio business that — editorial has held up. You don’t see a lot of fluff in reviews like you do in other categories. Read the reviews, pay attention to it, but decide what you think you’re going to need as best you can and talk to people. I mean, don’t be afraid to go to a qualified retailer. Because they can give you a lot of advice from experience that you’re not going to have.
Musical speaker design in a home theater world
LU: You’ve already talked about this a bit, but has your design philosophy changed with the advent of home theater years ago? Or do you feel like if you design a speaker that does well with music, the home theater side kind of takes care of itself — other than, of course, having to come up with center channels and subs and stuff like that?
CB: It’s changed it more in centers and subs than it has, actually, in the main channels, particularly the front left and right. To be honest, most video soundtracks suck. How can you judge anything from that? I mean, they just do. There are some that are really good recordings and I think we’ve found them. But in general, you rent a movie, what you’re after is the sound effect; you’re not after the air. And most people don’t track sound.
LU: You’re not doing critical listening on a soundtrack.
CB: Exactly right. But when you turn on a piece of music, that’s when I think we get you. And so we’ve never really given that up. When you put on a piece of music, if it’s a good recording, you should know it immediately.
You know, it’s impossible to tell a consumer you make the best, or even a really good-sounding, loudspeaker. You can’t say it in words. The proof is in the listening. And that’s one of the reasons NHT’s been as successful as it has been. People get it home and they go, “Oh; I can live with this. My music has never sounded like this before.” And they’re not paying a huge premium for that. I don’t think we’d ever give that up. We’re too much of a music company. We may end up being dinosaurs because of it but I don’t think we’ll ever give it up.
Yes, music is clearly the most important. Even in something like Verve. Even though we weren’t trying to do pinpoint imaging, it had to sound good in music or we wouldn’t have done it.
LU: How do you feel the new Absolute Zero compares to the old Super Zero, which was probably your most famous speaker?
CB: A little bit more bass. I mean, we managed to put a 5-1/4 in basically the same-sized box. I think the Absolute Zero’s the closest thing we have to our XD system — if you set them up right. That’s the hard part. People buy a little loudspeaker, they tuck it up in a corner, they don’t think about the sound. You set them up on a pair of stands with a decent sub, and I’d put it against stuff that’s selling for $3,000, $4,000. The dispersion, the high frequency is there. Alone, it’s like the original Super Zero — it doesn’t have a lot of bass. But it’s a wonderful-sounding loudspeaker. When I first heard it, it scared me a little bit. I said, “Wow — how are we going to sell the rest of this stuff?” [Laughter] Of course, I think all our stuff really sells itself when people have the time to get a really decent demo. That’s another reason to go to a qualified retailer.
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