Paradigm is a Toronto, Canada-based high-performance loudspeaker manufacturer known for combining audio science with luxury design and the company is famous for in-house engineering and manufacturing its own drivers, crossovers and cabinets. Their product range spans home theater, audiophile and custom installation, all emphasizing high performance-to-value.
Here’s an excerpt from a conversation we recently had with John Bagby, Managing Director of Paradigm’s parent company, PML Sound.
George McClure: I believe that Paradigm is kind of a family affair for you, so I’m just wondering if you could give us some of the high points of the company’s story.
John Bagley: Sure. So today, PML Sound encompasses four companies — Paradigm, Anthem, MartinLogan, and GoldenEar (which we purchased last year). Paradigm was founded in 1982 by Scott Bagby and Jerry VanderMarel. The first public demonstrations of our products occurred in August at Toronto Audiofest. At that time in Canada, Toronto Audiofest was make or break. If you did well there you had a future in front of you. If you didn’t, then it was time to go home and rethink things.
Paradigm’s founders were aware of a study that was still taking place at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) which eventually became foundational to the modern understanding of acoustics. They had access to these world-class development facilities as well as guidance on how to design a loudspeaker. They figured that with the knowledge being gained from this association with the NRC that they’d be able to build a better product, and at very competitive pricing. The first products were released — the Monitor 7 and the Monitor 5 — and with the first production runs sold out at Toronto Audiofest, Paradigm was off to an auspicious start.
The company grew rapidly from that point, both in sales and from a technical and manufacturing perspective. We started pulling more things in-house, building our own drivers, creating new reference designs, and assisting with the research at the NRC. A lot of the early Paradigm guys were integral participants in those studies. Paradigm eventually built out our own engineering facilities, with several of the NRC team members joining the company. The focus was always on how to build better products. That mentality was what allowed Paradigm to establish itself as being about high quality at a good price.
“Real-world practicality and application have always been incredibly important aspects of what wedo here because where the rubber meets the road is in a customer’s living room or theater – not in a curated laboratory environment.”
John Bagby – Paradigm
George: Yes, I think that’s what Paradigm is really known for. Tell us about your operation in Canada.
John: We currently have a 225,000 square foot facility in Mississauga, Ontario that encompasses manufacturing, office space, engineering and warehousing. We’re an incredibly vertically integrated company, and that’s something that started in the early days. Scott’s thing was always, if we didn’t like the price or we didn’t like the quality, we were going to do it ourselves. That’s really how our manufacturing evolved. The first facility was the smallest, and they’ve gotten bigger each time. In the late 80s the second facility became necessary, not just from a manufacturing perspective, but also with the development of in-house engineering tools and engineering infrastructure.
Paradigm really learned the lesson from the NRC in terms of the development process and what is necessary in order to actually get a good-sounding speaker at the end of it. That’s a two-part thing. It requires measurements for validation and as a guiding tool in development, but also double-blind listening tests. And so, we built out a new anechoic chamber [A specialized, sound-proofed room designed to completely absorb reflections of sound or electromagnetic waves, simulating an open, echo-free “free field” environment. — Ed. ] as well as double-blind listening rooms with multiple possible configurations so that we could recreate and expand what went on at the NRC. And obviously it’s much faster to measure something in our chamber or set up a blind listening test than drive the five hours to Ottawa.
George: Well, that’s pretty amazing to have your own anechoic chamber there. I mean, that alone is quite a high-end capability.
John: We actually have the largest one dedicated to audio in North America, and it’s an incredible development tool. In the early 90s, the NRC studies were winding down, so we brought a couple of their researchers on board to work for Paradigm. Since we had now built out our own facilities, we continued that research through the 90s, through the 2000s, and to this day, in terms of listener preferences, and really trying to understand how the products were going to interact with different environments.
In the 90s, we also purchased Anthem [known as Sonic Frontiers at the time] to add an electronics brand to the portfolio, with an eye towards eventually developing a technology that we’d had in the back pocket since the NRC — room correction. That’s really where you’re able to close that final gap between what we’ve designed and measured in our chamber, what we’ve evaluated in our multiple listening rooms, and then transfer that seamlessly into a customer environment, whatever that may be. Real-world practicality and application have always been incredibly important aspects of what we do here because where the rubber meets the road is in a customer’s living room or theater— not in a curated laboratory environment.
George: Other than trying to deliver the best sound at a reasonable price, what is Paradigm’s overall design philosophy?
John: I would say that our goal is to bring good sound to as many people as possible. If we want to simplify it down, it’s that. Who we are as a company and what it is that we try to achieve as a company has evolved over time. Product categories have evolved and customer expectations have evolved. The first place is the architectural side of things, which is very design-focused in terms of how it’s designed to fit into the home. That market has expanded considerably and become very solution-based, having products that reflect the customers’ vision for the home while still fulfilling their performance expectations. There’s been a move towards small form factors and less of a visual imprint throughout the house. Later this year, we’ll be releasing Invisible Speakers, as well as variable aperture products that can be adjusted to match 3, 3.5, or 4-inch downlights. At the same time, we’ve seen a substantial increase in demand for larger, truly high performance in-wall and in-ceiling models for living room and theater applications. People are still very interested in creating that cinema experience at home; they just want it to be more integrated into the home.
But where the big change has been over the last number of years is probably with our core lineup. That has to do with the fact that we’re not just talking about function anymore. Form has become an incredible portion of the conversation at every price point. We’re selling not just speakers, it’s really high-performance furniture. If somebody’s putting these into their room, it needs to meet the expectations that people have of luxury goods. You need automotive grade finishes, you need real wood veneers, you need nicely finished metal that’s also durable. Everything you touch, everything you see should reflect the environment that you’re wanting these to go into. And so, whether you’re talking about complex cabinet shapes, whether you’re talking about the finishes or color availability, that’s really where the design ethos has changed. We want to balance sound. We want something that when you hear it play, it sounds natural, like the voice of someone who’s in the room. We want them to play loud, we want them to play clear, and we want them to play low. For a lot of customers, when they turn the system on, they want to be able to show it off. They need to be beautiful when they’re not playing, and they need to blow your hair back when they are.
George: As long as we’re talking about the traditional speakers, please tell us about your Persona line.
John: Flagship products tend to be a great way of refining things and gaining an understanding for future developments, and the Persona Series is certainly an example of that. It incorporates the best materials that you could ever want to use in a speaker. Starting with the acoustic platform, you’ve got a brilliant mid-range and a brilliant beryllium tweeter. As a material, beryllium is hard to beat. It’s light, it’s damped, it’s incredibly stiff, and it allows for a clarity and a refinement of the overall sound that can’t be matched. We went all out with magnetics, we went all out with some of the designs that are completely exclusive to us and are things that nobody else does. It’s a benefit of having both the manufacturing and the design teams located under one roof.
How to build something is often one of the critical aspects of a new design. And if you want complex designs, having our expert manufacturing team able to assist right from the start is very, very important. Acoustically, Persona is our pinnacle, but it’s also from a design standpoint. That was really when Paradigm started to pursue the high style design. Persona is a modern, almost techy looking product, with beautiful paint finishes and machined aluminum accents. We offer over 20 color selections, so designers and end-users can customize it as they see fit. And if they want a particular color that’s going to make it fit the best into their room, we are more than happy to exchange color samples and figure out how we’re going to get that for them. So, it’s a very popular line and something that makes a statement before you even turn them on.
George: That really reinforces the idea that it’s furniture or a piece of art, like a sculpture that produces sound.
John: Exactly. There’s artwork associated with it – it plays art and it can also be art. You talked about moving into the high performance categories and our sort of value roots, but I’d contend that value can exist at any price point, that it’s not what you pay, it’s what you get.
George: Good point.
John: Our goal is to have people feel like when they buy a Paradigm, that they got a good deal on it, regardless of how much they spent.
George: Let’s move on to your architectural models.
John: We have multiple performance tiers when it comes to our architectural lines, including our CI Home Series, CI Pro Series, and CI Elite Series. A 6-1/2-inch in-ceiling speaker, for example, goes for anywhere from $149 each up to about $600 each with the Elite E65R. And with each step up, you’re getting higher performance materials, higher performance drivers. You’re getting frames that are made out of nylon and carbon fiber to provide an isolated acoustic platform to vibrate the drywall less, with rubber isolation. You’re getting increased performance, increased refinement. They’ll play louder, they’ll play lower, they’ll play clearer, but all of them will fit into the same sort of overall industrial ID package. We’ve modified our grilles to move to a microperf frame, and we always want to have the smallest grille for, say, a 6-1/2-inch driver. That’s a goal of ours — to minimize the visual footprint. So, our architectural lineup encompasses about 50 different products, and then you’ve also got all of our outdoor options.
George: It’s good to know that people have that kind of choice.
John: Our higher tier CI, including our Pro tier and our Elite tier, are all made in Canada. We injection-mold the frames ourselves, which is where we get into our carbon fiber nylon blends that we use that are acoustically damped. We cut the molds ourselves. So, we have a machine shop, a plastic injection-mold shop, driver manufacturing, final assembly, and wood shop located here, although that tends to be just for our high performance theater options. We have high performance theater in-walls that are built here that incorporate wooden back boxes so that they’re isolated sonically from the rest of the home.
We’re also excited about a high performance in-wall subwoofer we released last year, the SFC-12. It uses a vibration-canceling array — it’s got two drivers that are opposed, and as they fire towards each other, the movement of one cancels the movement of the other. It’s then put into an aluminum enclosure that’s suspended from an aircraft cable in the wall so it’s completely isolated from the drywall in the structure. It creates accurate deep bass without rattling the whole house.
George: Tell us a little about the Décor Series soundbars.
John: Each Décor Series soundbar is a fully customizable, all aluminum, made-to-order solution. It allows, for instance, a three-channel soundbar to be custom-sized to the TV and mounted underneath. It’s a straightforward ordering process on our website. We have a database of TVs that allows us to provide precise measurements, so you just enter your TV’s model number, select what type of bar configuration you want, whether it’s a one channel, two channel, three channel, whether you want speakers underneath or on either side of the TV, whether you want a contour to match the TV, and we will include the mounting options for the wall as well as the mounting options to attach it directly to the TV.
It really provides a middle ground between architectural speakers and traditional in-room solutions. It’s going to be minimally visible, but it can also be used in applications where architectural speakers may not be suitable. You might have a vaulted ceiling; you might have a TV mounted over a fireplace where it’s just not practical to be able to have speakers to either side or to be putting in-walls and in-ceilings. And so, it gives you a simple, elegant solution.
George: Are there any new or upcoming products that you’d like to mention?
John: Yes. Later this year we’re going to be releasing our new Invisible Speakers. That’s something we’ve been working on for over two years now, developing our own from the ground up. It’s a completely in-house design. It’s multiple years of simulation and material selection and both manufacturing and environmental testing. This type of speaker is mounted directly in line with the drywall. Once it’s mounted, the drywaller comes in, they mud up to the edges, then the speaker gets painted, sanded, finished exactly the same as the rest of the wall or the ceiling.
George: So, they’re literally invisible.
John: Exactly. We’re very excited to have those coming out towards the end of the Summer. We’re also going to be releasing a new series of small aperture, small opening in-ceiling speakers. These incorporate a dual 5-1/2-inch vibration-canceling base unit mounted up in the ceiling joists and then vented out through a downpipe. A single SKU will support three mounting locations — center justified, right justified, left justified. You can actually reposition where the downpipe is, and it supports 3-inch, 3-1/2-inch, or 4-inch openings, round openings, square openings, and trimless openings. They’re incredibly versatile.
George: Thanks for an engaging conversation, John.
