Relying on his "golden ears" to judge the quality of his work, Sandy Gross founded Definitive Technology in 1990 to create affordable high-performance speakers for the masses. From its first Supertower, which wedded a bipolar speaker and a subwoofer in a single enclosure, through the constantly evolving Mythos line of flat-panel-friendly speaker designs, Gross's company has consistently broken new ground in the audio world.
When you started Definitive Technology, how were you able to reconcile your goals of high performance and affordability?
I don't know that it was a question of reconciling those goals as much as being able to achieve them. Speaker design is very complex, and there are many, many decisions to be made. First of all, to create a really good high-performance loudspeaker, you have to know what good is. Then you have to have the engineering talent available and make the correct compromises as you go along to end up with a speaker that offers that ideal balance of performance and value.
Was it just a coincidence that you started your company right as home theater was taking off?
When we started in 1990, home theater was beginning to evolve, but that wasn't the impetus to launch the company. It was fortuitous that home theater was happening at that time because back in the '70s and '80s, I was predicting that when audio married video it would be the most important thing to ever happen to the A/V market — which, I think, it turned out to be. But even though our company has a tremendous reputation with home theater, we develop our speakers using music almost exclusively. The ability of a speaker to perform well in a home theater isn't antithetical to its ability to sound good with music.
What led you to merge bipolar speakers with subwoofers?
As home theater developed, the subwoofer became a big part of it. But it's a long process to blend a sub properly with the rest of the system, even when it's part of the speaker as it is with one of our Supertowers. When you have a separate sub, its position in the room can be anywhere relative to the speakers, and in many cases it's not even designed to go with any specific speakers. In that case, the blending is being done by the listener in his home, and that's not ideal. We felt that by designing the sub as part of the speaker we could achieve higher performance — and a lifestyle advantage by not having separate subs in the room.
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| "The Mythos Supertower, or ST, is our first Mythos tower with a built-in sub. It's 3 inches taller, 3 inches deeper, and half an inch wider than our Mythos One tower, so it's very sleek and sexy. Its sub offers performance equivalent to our SuperCube One. The ST addresses the desire of people attracted to our Mythos products who want to get subwoofer boxes up off the floor and make them disappear." |
It's interesting — the sales of our SuperTowers have increased dramatically over the last 5 years, so people still want freestanding speakers. But we evolved our Mythos line to offer a high-performance speaker that would go with the high-tech look of flat-panel TVs — in fact, we basically defined the concept of the "plasma speaker" with that line. A major focus in our industry over the last 10 years has been on hiding everything, which I feel is a shame. In the modern home, a lot of the appliances, like Viking ranges in the kitchen, are high-end accoutrements that people like to show off. So we created the Mythos line to address that. We have smaller speakers with stands so they can go on the furniture when a flat-panel TV is on a stand, but we also have several tower models that look very attractive when placed next to TVs on the wall or in dedicated furniture.
What do you see for the industry 5 or 10 years from now?
The biggest trend developing right now is distributing sound around the home. I hope the technology for doing that develops in such a way that it doesn't degrade the sound quality of what people are listening to. The major focus is on distributing program material over the Internet and storing it at home in a way that's very different from what's gone on until now. Another issue the whole industry is facing — and it goes well beyond just the audio industry — is the problems of the recorded-music industry. A good friend of mine, David Chesky, speaks to me often about what's going on with downloading. It's become financially difficult for record companies to be viable, especially with less than mainstream material, and now we're seeing the closing of Tower Records. At a record store, you can go and browse through racks of CDs — not even in esoteric areas, but just jazz or classical music — and see things you hadn't thought of and then walk home with them. All of this is becoming homogenized, and that's a major issue.
How big a market is there for serious music listening?
The market continues to be large. The research that I've seen suggests that baby boomers, who helped create the audio industry as we know it in the '60s and '70s, have a desire to get re-involved with serious listening. This is something that will continue to make our industry vital and healthy.
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