"To your question on my favorite building block of wood, a 1" cube of spruce has something like 5'000'000 tiny cells which contained sap before it was dried. That makes for very effective energy absorption. I can't quantify how exactly that material makeup influences the resonant behavior of a solid-wood cabinet. I just hear a different quality than with metal. With speaker drivers, I had an early fascination with bronze baskets because it's what Bernard Salabert used. Later I heard Leonid Burchev's Russian Etalon speakers in Munich. His drivers too had bell-bronze baskets. It's impossible for me to describe their precise sonic flavor. I just recognize it when I hear it. I heard it with PHY drivers and again with Etalon's. The vast majority of people call these effects colorations. By that they mean that we add something to the sound that shouldn't be there. My answer to that is simple. I enjoy it as do my clients. So what? Today John DeVore uses sand-cast bronze baskets for his flagship speaker. You've reported on Kevin Scott's Living Voice speaker with the long bronze horn. Different people who experimented with bronze agree on its benefits. As you told me once, even the late Eduardo de Lima of Audiopax used chromed bronze for his amplifier chassis because that sounded better to him than stainless steel or aluminium.

Wave 40 in Le Mont Pelèrin flat.

"Still on that topic, Armin Galm built a 16cm driver for another manufacturer who used it as a single driver in a transmission line. It got fairly good reviews. I asked Armin what more he could do to that driver. Even he volunteered that going away from the original cast aluminium basket would probably be an improvement. He also did some drivers for sonus Faber. They ended up in luxury cars like Lamborghini. It was a smaller production run for a very upscale project so he decided to do it from scratch. He turned those baskets like I did for my prototype bronze baskets to compare them to aluminium. I originally tried to source those here in Europe. I was quoted €300/ea because you start out with a solid block of bronze and discard about 95% in shavings. It's why I eventually had them made in China. As it turned out, their foundries use US not EU standards for their alloys. When I ordered the particular bronze composition I wanted, I didn't realize that they'd convert to US specs. When Armin got those baskets, he thought they looked more like brass than bronze so too yellow. That was a surprise. Now I've just about worked through my stock of them and need to source replacements. I looked around locally and found a tourist shop with Swiss cowbells. That rang another bell. I asked where they are made. There are about 3-4 small family foundries here in Switzerland that do them. I already decided to have one of them make us the bronze basket for our 16cm driver. I 3D printed two mold shells for sand casting and sent them off last week. There'll be some post-production machining involved to remove minor burrs and polish up the fronts.


Swiss cow-bell foundry which Martin is currently working with for new driver bronze baskets.

"I actually met the older gent in this video. He was really surprised by my two-part shells. They eliminate having to machine out the basket openings and associated €100 fee. He's done sand casting for 40 years. He's never seen my solution for their two-stage process. He asked where I came up with the idea. I thought it was pretty obvious yet he was completely floored. It was another one of those instances where not moving up through the usual education for a given job helped me look at it with fresh eyes. I saw something the experts missed. He admitted that it wasn't how he'd do it but when asked whether it works, he said that it does; perfectly.

"Again, I just needed someone open enough to give something different a try. Not knowing enough about it, I solved a problem in a way which never occurred to him. Obviously big speaker houses couldn't bother with such labor-intensive production processes. Casting bronze baskets in sand one at a time in a small family foundry somewhere in the Swiss alps wouldn't be in the picture. So when you buy from us, you really get something rather bespoke and different.

Libération in Lecanvey house.

"For the Liber|8 project Simon now works on a first assembled prototype of its steam-bent oval frame. We'd prepped original wood sections for that 2 years ago. I want to move away from the 8" Enviée's whizzer which I had originally specified for this project. At the time we didn't yet have our smaller 6-inch Vox driver. In the Libération I use one of the full-range 8-inchers without and one with whizzer. Paralleling two without whizzer lost a bit on top. With the smaller Vox driver I now expect an even smoother upper mid/lower treble response. I also want to move away from the Raal ribbon whose transformer gets unwieldy in an open baffle. For a dipole, the obvious choice seemed to be one of the Mundorf AMT. I just didn't like their sound. I tried Beyma's but it was no different. The particular plastic they use for their folded membranes doesn't work for me. Then an Italian friend of Armin's hipped me to Aurum Cantus. Theirs comes with just a bit of a felt damper stuck to the rear. Remove that and it's an open dipole. That driver seems to hit the mark. I still need to hear it installed at a distance but it's promising. So I'll try working with Aurum Cantus and see where that leads. I now have to ship my Liber|8 protos over to Chris in the UK to do the final filter design. He's already come up trumps with a few filter simulations. For one of the simpler ones, he'll actually use two of the woofer voice coils as midrange inductors. He says it's quite unusual but still not a series but parallel filter. I don't understand all of it yet. Hearing will be believing.

Libération in Lecanvey house.

"On the dual 12" Ripol sub project to scale down your big version, I'm presently held up on the electronics. Alberto Guerra's new Tempo platform looks ideal but C-19 and its supply-chain issues have delayed him just as they have Pál Nagy and his Gradient Box circuit." When asked what he currently runs in his upstairs system, "I have a Pink Faun streamer which runs I²S into a Denafrips Terminator discrete R2R DAC, a Nagra Classic preamp and the AGD Vivace monos. Soo In's Enleum AMP-23R arrived last week. I also have a Puritan Audio Labs conditioner and custom Bibacord speaker cables with integral LessLoss Firewalls. Fredrik Berefelt of Bibacord is a senior scientist at the Swedish Defense Research Agency working in aerospace and aeronautics. When he first saw the LessLoss Firewall for Loudspeakers, he was fascinated. He knew what it was and understood how and why it works. We pooled our resources and bought 60 OEM units. I now integrate them into my speakers as a surcharge option, he incorporates them in wooden casings in his speaker cables." As with Carbide's footers, there's no not-designed-here fear, just pragmatic enthusiasm. Whenever Martin learns of novel solutions to old problems, he investigates them thoroughly. If they make sense, they end up in his products.

That now concludes our interview. The key insight I took away is that for Martin, the journey itself really is the destination. That's like Flemming Rasmussen who in his interview explained that when he paints, he hasn't a clue what will result. It's in the process of painting that the creative impulse reveals itself. That explains Martin's happiness to invest considerable time and money prototyping unusual ideas to solve standard problems. A clearly keen design sense then packages a given project in a visually appealing form using noble materials like bronze and solid wood. His products are as far from cookie-cutter norms as is possible. That includes being very different even from his original inspiration Boenicke Audio. What's more, each of his sound|kaos speaker models differs from the next by degrees most uncommon for the usual portfolio by one maker. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect multiple personalities taking turns proposing the next project. In an industry dominated by rinse and repeat, that's so atypical. It's why I pursued this interview in the first place. I wanted to find out how it all came about and continues to go about.

Thanks for the chat, Martin. Es het mi gfröit. Bis schpäter. That was my attempt at Swiss German: I enjoyed it. See you later.