By George McClure
Since 2005, Steinway and Sons has partnered with Lyngdorf Audio to create a wide range of elegant audio solutions. We recently spoke with Katherine Spiller, Director of Sales and Marketing for the Americas.
George McClure: Steinway & Sons is obviously an iconic name in pianos. What made them initially want to get into the audio/video business?
Katherine Spiller: Steinway & Sons is, as you said, an iconic brand, so there’s a big attraction there. They were being approached by a lot of people who wanted to just license their name and put it on things that were completely unrelated to audio or to music, which to them didn’t feel right. Something like 98% of concert halls choose Steinway, and with that kind of heritage they feel very strongly about protecting the brand.
In the early 2000s, the people at Steinway were introduced to Peter Lyngdorf by a mutual friend. What really drives a lot of his innovation is his passion for music, and there’s no greater image in his mind of a musical company than Steinway. So he was all-in immediately for the opportunity. He had just recently started Lyngdorf Audio, which was primarily a digital amplifier company. And from the very first meeting there was this incredible amount of synergy and shared passion that he felt with Steinway. He promised them then that he could create something really spectacular.
He went back to Denmark and started a lot of things from scratch, because he wanted them to rethink everything along the way. He really thought from the ground up, “If we could control every element in this audio chain, what could we do differently?” So he started from there. And what they created was the Model D music system, which included the Model D speakers, bespoke electronics, and Lyngdorf’s RoomPerfect™ room calibration software.
George: And how was that received?
Katherine: Well, he brought it to New York for Steinway to hear. He picked a CD with really great recordings of a Steinway piano, and the Steinway executives in the room could hear for the first time, from a recording, if the piano had been made in the factory in Hamburg, Germany or the one in Long Island. Those are subtle nuances that they could tell immediately when they’re listening live, but they didn’t know that you could actually play them back from a CD and capture them. It was really the first time that someone had lived up to the level of performance that they stake their reputation on, and they wanted to go all in. Today, though our partnership is known as Steinway Lyngdorf, our products all carry the Steinway & Sons logo — the first non-piano pieces ever to have that. Then Lyngdorf Audio has its own line, as well.
George: You do beautiful two-channel systems, but you also offer all the speakers necessary to do multi-channel surround systems. Tell us a little bit about the expansion of your product line.
Katherine: It’s been fun to watch the evolution of the brand. We started with the Model D, where not only are the speakers the opposite of architectural in-wall speakers, but even the electronics at that time were. We didn’t have rack-mount electronics when we first started, so if you look at some of those early pictures of the Model D, you’ll notice the head unit piece standing between the tall speakers. It’s about four feet tall and kind of a beautiful furniture piece with a gold volume control knob on the front. That was actually the processor. We had all the inputs on the back and an integrated CD player. Then the amplifiers were actually in the backside of the speakers, so everything was right there.
So we started with these very beautiful speakers. The lacquer, when you see the high gloss finish, all of those panels are done at the woodworking center at our factory in Skive, Denmark, but then the panels go to Hamburg, Germany, and they’re finished with the piano lacquer by the same people finishing the pianos.
George: That’s very cool. Some manufacturers have a finish called “piano gloss black,” but in your case it’s literally true!
Katherine: Exactly. After the Model D the line grew with a smaller version called the Model C. And then we went into our first home theater surround system, with our first surround processor, electronics and in-wall speakers. We started off with some smaller speakers called the Model M, which can go completely in-wall, on-wall or semi in-wall, but also line sources — we’re huge fans of the line-source design.
We love the idea of being able to have even volume throughout a space so that the first row of theater and the last row have the same volume experience. Once we decided to do a multi-channel processor, we knew we wanted to have a line source as one of our offerings for the theater. Because everything that Steinway does is designed to be really scalable. Did you know we have DSP [Digital Signal Processing] in our amplifiers and in our processors?
George: That’s interesting.
Katherine: For us, it really made sense to have the DSP live in the amplifier so that if you add more speakers and amps to make the system bigger, everything scales up really nicely.
When we went into multi-channel, we really went in with a pretty full line. So we came up with smaller speakers that could be placed below a TV if it was a solid screen, or they could be placed behind a transparent filmscreen without reflection. And then we also had line-source options. So right away we had a pretty wide variation for surround systems. That was in 2009. We jumped in heavily then, and it’s really expanded based on client demand.
As we got deeper and deeper into the custom installation market in the U.S., we started working with some phenomenal partners and learned a lot. We have full-range in-ceiling speakers, if people want to do a more distributed audio style system. We have smaller speakers that can go below a large panel. We have solutions for the video walls. We have the line sources that we talked about in the theater. And we do a lot of custom stuff, which I jokingly call standard custom.
George: A bit of an oxymoron.
Katherine: [Laughs] Yes, if you speak to anyone in manufacturing, it’s either standard or it’s custom. But we’re a solutions driven company, so we do a lot of custom systems, but we do them often enough that they sort of become standard custom, if you will. We create them based on the needs of our partners. We do a lot of custom woofers, for example — we can go down to under four inches of depth, but you won’t see those on our website necessarily, we don’t have product pictures of them. We also do a lot of innovative in-ceiling, in-wall woofers, maybe we’ve designed them to be side-firing out of a fireplace mantle so that when you look at the front of the fireplace, there’s no change in the décor and there’s just a really slim grille or fabric or maybe wooden slats on the side of the mantle where the base can come out of.
So we kind of work on a case by case basis to figure out the solution for that space — what the client wants in terms of performance, what they want in terms of the aesthetics and the décor, you know, what we need to do in terms of space management working with the architects so we’re not impeding on or infringing on what they need for their structure and their vision. It’s really a team effort to create these incredible installations. So our product line expands based on those kind of projects. We don’t just come out of the box — we’re definitely willing to create the product to fit a need.
George: Tell us about your Model A speaker, which is an in-room model that can be placed closed to a wall.
Katherine: The Model A is actually one of my favorites. It’s a lot of fun. The flagship Model D is a phenomenal speaker, but for optimal performance it does need to be three feet off that front wall, which is often not optimal, design-wise. And the Model D is also almost seven feet tall. We can do custom colors and work with interiors and make sure that it matches the décor, but it is a statement piece. So the Model A really was born out of the desire to have something that could be a smaller, more compact footprint in a room, but also something that could be boundary loaded. Especially with the huge trend in video walls. You know, people often have these large displays and they’d like to have something kind of flanking the TV or credenza.
George: Sure.
Katherine: Being able to push the speakers back up against the wall was great. Typically, that causes issues with frequency response, but since we’re using the integrated system, we know we’re always going to have the RoomPerfect calibration system to handle any of those. And the nice thing about having a speaker up against the wall is that you get additional power and better timing. You don’t have as many reflections bouncing around the room and slowing the delay in the timing. We actually love being up against the wall when we can for a closed cabinet speaker.
So we felt like it was a win for everyone — our side, the client side, the designer side, the architect side, and everyone was really happy with it. We have two speakers that fall into that category. The Model A is our newest one, and it’s a full-range speaker, which has two 12-inch drivers on the front side facing forwards. Then we have the Model O, which is a smaller version, but a similar design. It’s actually also full range. You only see the mid and high drivers on the front, but on the bottom in the back we have a passive bass driver. We actually had the Model O first and it had tremendous response to that placement option, so we wanted to create an even bigger version of that with the Model A.
