Translations:

What do you think would be the result if a man who is a world class renowned musician decided to design a loudspeaker?

Shelley Katz is a pianist who’s playing was broadcast on Canadian international radio at the age of six, has studied at the Juilliard School of Music, conducted orchestras in Germany, played at Carnegie hall in New York, has accompanied Dame Gwyneth-Jones and the tenor Nicolai Gedda on his farewell world tour.

However, in addition to these artistic achievements there is a scientific side to Shelley. While working at an opera house in Germany he arranged for a digital piano to be used in the classical orchestra pit. He started to ponder on the issue of just why the digital piano was unable to sound convincingly like a conventional acoustic piano.

While working at Cambridge University in England towards his PHD in Cognition of Expression in Music he conducted research into acoustics and sound propagation. This lead him to produce an electric piano which did actually manage to closely approximate the sound and behaviour of an acoustic instrument.

Since these developments were all in connection with acoustics and sound propagation, he then decided to find out if similar methods could be employed in the design of loudspeakers.

The original aim of stereo when it was first invented, was to create a soundstage in front of the listener, so that instruments would appear to originate from where they are located in the live concert hall. The aim of ‘High-End’ audio has been to realise this as completely as possible and to extend the soundstage in all dimensions. The idea is to be able to hear the ‘layering’ of different groups of instruments deep into the soundstage. You should also be able to hear reflected sound from the walls of the hall.

You may be familiar with binaural recordings which achieve a kind of surround sound experience when listened to on a pair of headphones. This is difficult to achieve with a single pair of stereo speakers, however.

Shelley explained to me that a natural musical instrument in a concert hall generates both binaurally correlated or direct sound and binaurally de-correlated or reflected sound. Most loudspeakers produce mostly binaurally correlated sound, so it is difficult to get them to produce the natural sounds of instruments as they propagate within an acoustic space.

Shelley’s Podium speakers in contrast, produce far more binaurally de-collerated sound. This allows them to bring the sound of the instruments, within the space they were recorded, into your room.

So to return to the question I posed at the beginning, the result is a loudspeaker quite unlike any other you are likely to encounter.

They are also able to realistically reproduce dynamic contrasts and can be driven by amplifiers rated at only 25 watts per channel, unlike other panel speakers.

Lovers of Classical music, Jazz and any music using acoustic instruments recorded in a live space will obviously be attracted to the Podiums. However, as noted by Harry Pearson of the Absolute Sound, a system able to correctly reproduce un-amplified music in an acoustic space, will also correctly reproduce other kinds of music recorded in the artificial spaces of recording studios.

You are welcome to experience these amazing speakers for yourself here at Sound Galleries. Visit Podium Sound