MartinLogan
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| Corporation | |
| Industry | Electronics |
| Founded | Lawrence, Kansas (1979) |
| Headquarters | Lawrence, Kansas |
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Key people
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Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland, co-founders |
| Products | Audio |
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Number of employees
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70+ |
| Website | MartinLogan Global |
MartinLogan is an American company producing conventional subwoofer speakers as well as floor-standing, wall-mounted, and in-wall hybrid speakers using electrostatic loudspeaker and planar magnetic thin film loudspeaker technology.
MartinLogan was founded by Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland who met in the late 1970s at a high-end audio store Sanders managed in Lawrence, Kansas. Despite different backgrounds (Sanders had trained in architecture and advertising, Sutherland in electrical engineering) they shared a passion for music and electrostatic loudspeakers.
Discussion of electrostatic speakers and the available technology led Sanders and Sutherland to design and build an electrostatic speaker. Sanders organized a research and development team to transform a design he had tinkered with for more than a decade into a marketable electrostatic transducer.
The first prototype was ready in 1980. The sound quality was adequate, but at high volume levels there was arcing within the electrostatic panels.
The team began experiments with aerospace materials that led to improved performance. The drivers were made with conductive coatings, insulation, and adhesives, and an ultra-light Mylar diaphragm between two perforated-steel stators.
Satisfied with the aesthetics, Sanders still struggled with achieving satisfactory high-frequency dispersion without compromising sound quality (physically wide transducers radiate high frequencies in a narrow beam rather than fanning them over a wide area.) The solution came in a midnight session when Sutherland sketched a theoretical sound wave to illustrate how sound disperses. Sanders envisioned a horizontally curved panel, the curvilinear line-source (or CLS), transducer central to the design of every MartinLogan electrostat since.
With only a mock-up and some photographs, Sanders and Sutherland exhibited their speaker concept at the 1982 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago. The design was honored with a CES Design and Engineering Award. Excited by the response, they headed home to Kansas to translate their ideas into a working—and saleable—model.
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