Promising “Picture Perfect Sound®,” Leon Speakers is an American manufacturer of custom audio and audiovisual solutions that mix art with audio and design with technology. Here’s the second part of our recent chat with Founder Noah Kaplan.
By George McClure
George: Can you tell us about some of Leon’s commercial offerings?
Noah: We actually started to become known for understanding how audio and video work together. I was lucky, ’cause of being an artist I worked on movie sets, I worked on TV sets, I worked with filmmakers, I worked with directors, musicians. And I’ve seen how it’s all recorded from behind the scenes. So I realized, “Hey, what we’re doing is really about vocal articulation. What we’re doing is about delivering clarity and design.” And so our window into commercial came from a residential dealer who had this big vision. His name was Marc Trachtenberg. He owned a company called Teleris. It used to be a residential technology dealer. His vision was that he thought the whole world could be connected through video conferencing.
He spun off the business from what he was doing, which was a company called Mycroft. And he raised a whole bunch of money to create a company. And we were the audio integration side of his vision, which was that he wanted to make these immersive rooms that we called “Telepresence” at the time. Teleris used to have something over 40 percent, even up to 60 percent of global market share when it came to video conferencing.
I worked very closely with that team to develop really articulate, custom products that we could roll out to the biggest companies in the world. Everybody from Deutsche Bank all the way to big pharma. And we were doing this at scale, even when we were a small company.
Each room used to cost $500,000. So the fun part for me as a designer was that I was able to not skimp on any of the components. And the TVs were usually Fujitsu’s at the time, and they were thick. So basically we were just taking the best, highest-end studio monitor parts and putting them in to large format bars. The air volume was enough to give us full range. We did that for a really long number of years. As we’ve evolved we’ve become known mostly for very high-end video conferencing and telepresence suites. And we work for companies everywhere from Spotify to Apple to Google to Meta.
And so it’s been a real journey, and we’ve seen “telepresence” now become completely ubiquitous. So right now, yeah, we’re working on a whole suite of products for Logitech. I’m sitting in one of mine right now. So I could change my lighting scenarios right now, I could change my brightness. There’s sort of a warm yellow light. It has integrated cameras.
Our goal is to combine design and technology so it looks like a unified product. I don’t want people saying like, “Oh, there’s a camera, there’s a speaker, there’s a TV, there’s a whatever…” No, let’s think of this more as a holistic unit so you get a better experience, so that you feel connected with people. Because ultimately, the main goal is that you want people to feel connected to each other.
“That’s what we say when we are seeking balance by design. We want to balance all these things. You can have all the great sound and all the great design at once, and we don’t have to compromise those things.”
George: In the past few years this kind of stuff has really taken off, for obvious reasons.
Noah: The industry is so big, it’s a $250 billion commercial technology sector. Right now we’re working on solutions for Microsoft Teams rooms, because they’re rolling out millions of these rooms. What’s cool about our commercial company at scale, out of our factory, we could scale for a whole rollout globally.
When I came into the hi-fi industry, people loved the objects, they loved the tech, but they weren’t thinking about design. I found that exact same thing when I went to the commercial side. They’ll put up a screen and they’re worried about the camera angles and the speakers. But I’m like, “Hey, this thing looks like it was designed in a lab and there are wires hanging out everywhere. This is not professional.”
So I like to go in and just make it look like it’s a landed object. Like it’s a furnishing, like it’s a fixture. And I learned that from just watching how history unfolded, watching companies like Philco, RCA and JBL, like the big companies who used to be design companies.
George: Shifting gears a little bit, just in looking around your site I was kind of fascinated by the LiquidView Virtual Window. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Noah: Crazy project. I was working with another artist named Mitch Braff, who’s a director. He’s actually the Founder of that whole column of LiquidView, that whole product line. I got calls from him, he was doing high-end video installation art. We would help him integrate sound and design into his pieces. During the pandemic we had some pretty weird projects. We were doing animated family portraits for a customer, very high end. Every one had to be framed, it had TVs, it had sound. Designing that, and he started telling about his vision, that he really thinks that we can push this technology to show vantage points from the best places in the world. He was really fixated on this.
He and I started working and designing, and then a company called IDEO, which is the biggest design company globally, got wind of the project. We brought them in and then it just started really taking shape. What do we want this to look like? What does modern architecture look like? How do we make the thing look? How do we suspend disbelief? How do we make this interesting? And then we started talking about like, “Oh my God, imagine 24-hour views, time aligned to anywhere.”
Two fun parts about that. So Mitch, now he’s going and capturing all the most amazing views in the world at amazing resolutions. And what’s hard to see is the scale. So the scale of the panorama, you see the three window piece, that’s the heart of what we want to do. So at the heart of the business we’re like, “Imagine transforming your entire reality, where you really lose that sense of where you are in a basement.” All of a sudden you’re looking at, say, Sonoma Valley. From a weird spot in a hospital room, all of a sudden you’re in a rainforest.
And as time and work would have it, two years later we launched the product together. We’re installing all over, our first demo units, all across the world, places like hospitals and even with high-end integrators. And it turns out there’s a lot of people who have really bad views who are interested in this.
George: They want to improve them. Yeah, that’s amazing.
Noah: And check this out, ’cause you’ll appreciate this. When I first started selling speakers for TVs, the TVs used to be $25,000 to $50,000. The 65-inch TV from Fujitsu was what? You know…
George: Sure, 25 to 50 grand, easy.
Noah: So we’re offering the entire single window for 25 grand. That’s a 4K, 75-inch TV. All the computers that go in it, all what it takes to make it run, to architecturally inlay it into the wall. And it’s almost like we’re having to retrain people to say, “This is not a price product, this is an architectural product.” What I love about it, it has all the same challenges. But from a creative aspect it just checks all of our boxes. It mixes design with technology, art with audio, and it also allows us to see different parts of the world from a completely radical angle.
George: I love that concept. Can you give us just a brief overview of the Terra Outdoor Speakers, including the LuminSound, which combines a speaker and lighting?
Noah: We collaborated with Terra for a long time. They made our outdoor drivers. My MO is always to look for the people who are making the most reliable high-end products, and work with them and then try to help them with design. And that same thing started happening with Terra. My friend James Banfield, who is a really great engineer, was building a good company, but he didn’t really have a huge design sensibility. But those speakers were indestructible and sounded really good. We started redesigning it, and we realized about halfway through that the relationship would probably be better served if we actually merged. So we merged the company probably six or seven years ago, and kept everybody on board. I like to work with the experts, they still run the business out in Maine.
We started to push the limits of design. James and I always had a vision that sound could go farther, and he kind of conceived, he’s like, “Well why don’t we combine all these…” So he wanted to see less on the landscape, ’cause you’ll see a lighting thing and then a speaker thing and then a box thing and then… Too many objects. So he came to me with the concept, “Let’s launch this LuminSound line of stuff. It’s doing really well.
And so then slowly we just added the design elements. “Let’s make it customizable. Let’s make it out of modern architectural elements. Let’s add better lighting to it. Let’s make the integration better.” And so that’s been one of our most successful things. And we have dramatic new products coming out in that category. Dramatic, George — things that nobody has ever seen.
So that relationship is cool because we’re using the core architecture of Terra, but now when we’re talking about mixing design and sound and light, now we can have some fun. Because now we’re trying to work on the vibe of the space. We’re working on like, here is the vibe and what is it going to look like. As you know, lighting is coming more and more into our industry and being low voltage, we could all install it.
So some of the projects we got to do – Pebble Beach golf course – all LuminSound, everywhere. And then we added integrated pathway lighting from American Lighting. So again, these are all collaborations that lead to new things. And what I love about that, by just keeping the radar open, I’m looking for those new pathways, always. And collaborations get you stronger. And I think that comes from because I played in bands for so long, if you find a great bass player and you play that same song with that bass player, you’re going to learn something. You’re going to come up with something new. So it keeps me fresh, it keeps me on my feet, it keeps me creative.
George: Collaboration is essential, I think. Is there anything in your current line that we haven’t already discussed that you’re excited about?
Noah: There’s just one little thing coming up that I think is a very significant change. So if you were here right now, George, you’d see I surround myself with all kinds of objects that inspire us as a team. It could be a microphone from 1920 or it could be a speaker from 1950, whatever. And we’re always looking at these things like, “How did they make this?”
And then I realized there’s actually an answer to the question. The old audio designers worked for very amazing brands. People like RCA, like Sony, like Magnavox, like Philco, were very multidisciplinary. They did automotive stuff, they did furniture stuff. But they actually ran companies that thought a lot about design. So I don’t know if you know about the designer Dieter Rams, he designed all the stuff for Braun. This is the perfect example. Dieter Rams designed for Braun because they had the technology, he had the pulse of modern design. Charles and Ray Eames designed products in audio. They also designed the furniture. So what we did was the new products we’re working on now are designed by the famous architects of our time.
So I reached out to people who worked with Philippe Starck. And I’m working with a very amazing architect that I can’t disclose yet, who created an immense product line for us through an architectural lens. And what he did was so amazing that I almost can’t do it. What we created in a few months is more than I could ever achieve in my whole life. He designed more things than I could ever do.
And then from a home architectural side we brought a young design firm in to really help us reimagine the materials we’re using. And so I can tell you a little glimpse of this is we’re going to go back to those times when, instead of us trying to guess what the architects and designers need, we are going to a time where we’re going to collaborate with the modern architects and designers of our time, let them lead the story, let them understand the technology and let them tell the story.
So we created look books for them, we created look books with them, we created sample guides. There are new color palettes. So you’re going to see color is on our horizon. Our factory right now, three years ago we’d maybe have three, four or five different wood things going through and they were mostly speakers. Now we probably have 50 sometimes in a week, of people choosing custom colors, custom wood choices, custom finishes, new materials, metal, all these things. But embracing them and then embracing that in order for us all to move together we all have to work together more closely and less as silos. And again, same deal. I’m not changing my ways. I’m going to collaborate, I’m going to learn ’cause I love when I’m in that environment where I’m learning from them.
George: That’s got to be very exciting for the architects and designers, to be able to have that new palette for the technology.
Noah: I mean, I can’t wait to show you these things. And they’ll come out this year at CEDIA Expo in Denver, you’ll see the first iterations. And especially the women architects that we worked with, I just don’t think there was a lot of female voice in technology design — which is actually a problem. It just is a way underrepresented part of our category. You go to shows, and I go to a trade show and I see it’s mostly male-dominated, but when I go to a design show, an architectural design show in New York City, it’s totally not. And they’re actually leading the interiors conversation.
That’s what we say when we are seeking balance by design. We want to balance all these things. You can have all the great sound and all the great design at once, and we don’t have to compromise those things.
