Articles and whitepapers

Guest Commentary: Looking Beyond the Hype (2/6/2008)

By Ilpo Martikainen, Genelec

Founded 30 years ago, Genelec Oy has specialised in the design and manufacture of active monitoring speakers for professional applications in the broadcasting, recording and film industries. For several years now, our products have also found their way into music and film lovers’ residences in custom install systems, where the same professional qualities, although in a slightly different package, are highly valued for producing an authentic audio experience.

Part of the modus operandi of the consumer electronics industries is the hectic pace at which new, or at least face-lifted products, are introduced to match rapidly-changing trends, regardless of whether the change is actually an improvement in real performance or not. In certain mature areas, such as transducers for use in loudspeakers or microphones, real development is very slow, whereas in the case of new technologies such as software and networking, real development is fast. This fast pace can cause unrealistic expectations of technology as a whole and is not helped by marketing hype that describes loudspeaker performance for example, as being "beyond accurate”.

So how does the installer see beyond the hype? During the last twenty years, the principles behind designing and building good loudspeakers have been well established, and the delightful fact is that there is indeed a good correlation between the measurement of speaker performance and its perception. All that needs to happen now is for manufacturers to present these measurements in a clear and understandable way, so that installers can easily understand and interpret them.

Indeed the complexity of modern residential systems calls for specialist skills in many areas, not just in audio. Right from the design phase, the role of the installer, or better to say the system integrator, is crucial. Any developments therefore, that make installation and setup easier, such as embedded intelligence in system components to make them self-configuring, are going to be welcomed.

As seen in many other industries however, the time needed from the visionary concept to robust and reliably-working, easily-installable and interchangeable systems, is usually longer than anticipated, and a partial lack of commonly-accepted standards is not making progress any faster. We all remember the format battles, from Beta/VHS to HD-DVD/Blu-ray, and while these are all part of the gradual improvement pattern of technology, they have held back the market and have wasted resources. We can contrast this to what has happened in mobile communications during the last twenty years. Its rapid expansion would not have been possible if all major researchers, manufacturers and operators did not agree on an impressive number of complicated standards concerning transmission technology, frequencies, channels etc. The end result is that your phone can recognise how it should work almost in any country. This would not have been possible if everyone had simply promoted their own innovations as being absolutely the best, and had refused to cooperate.

As far as resources are concerned, the real opportunity for our industry is to look to the future and embrace green issues. Sooner or later, growing environmental concerns will affect the residential custom install industry, leading to lower power consumption, the use of recyclable materials, a longer life cycle, and so forth. People are already starting to jump on the bandwagon, and there will undoubtedly be plenty of hype, but what matters in the end is how much total energy is consumed from raw materials to final product, installed and working to the user’s satisfaction, summed with the energy the product will consume during its lifetime. This way of thinking is already common in some other industries, so early adopters in the residential systems market are likely to gain the advantage.

Ilpo Martikainen is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Genelec Oy. On 2 April 2008 he was conferred the title of Doctor of Science in Technology H.C. at the 20th Ceremonial Conferment of Doctoral Degrees at Helsinki University of Technology. The honorary doctorate was awarded based on his outstanding achievements in developing business in audio technology and in promoting research in the field at Helsinki University of Technology.

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