You won't find some of the best speaker devices in Silicon Valley or any of the other high-tech centres of the world. I've gone to Videbæk in West Jutland, where they do something particularly Danish. And there's a growing demand for their skills.
Scan Speak A/S. This is where the five different loudspeaker units for Loudspeaker Q113 will be produced.
The two Madsen brothers both work in production at Bang & Olufsen in Struer. They often visit the family's third brother in Videbæk, the mill builder N.C. Madsen. The house in Videbæk is the family's focal point, and the millwright's workshop with lathe and drill is the object of the enterprising brothers' experiments with everything from cars to experiments with electricity.
This could have been the beginning of a modern story, for the mill builder could have worked at Vestas in Videbæk, and his brothers could have worked at today's Bang & Olufsen. But the story of the three Madsen brothers is set in the early 1930s!
Here the brothers came up with the idea to try experimenting with loudspeakers. At the time, Bang & Olufsen bought their loudspeaker units in France and elsewhere, but the brothers imagined that they could invent a better product at home.
The workshop with lathe and drill was used to machine the necessary iron parts on which the speaker was to be based. The membrane was made from cardboard from the bookshop, the suspension was cut from laundry cloth from the grocer, the coil was wound by hand and assembled by Mrs Madsen at the kitchen table.
The three brothers continued their experiments and eventually got a usable speaker out of the work. Millwright N.C. Madsen became a loudspeaker manufacturer. This is the early beginning of what is today called Scan Speak A/S.
The Q113 Revolution bass speaker is a special edition of one of the wildest 5-inch speaker units ever made. Specified by the readers of the Engineer.
It's a story of creativity and enterprise
It's no secret that the loudspeaker is a Danish invention (Peter L. Jensen in 1915) and there are several good reasons why Danish companies still manage to maintain a global position of strength in sound. The best summary of the story is made by lydteknologi.dk and DELTA. You can find it here.
Some believe that the Danish success with sound is about the fact that we have a tradition of furniture making that is not found in the same way elsewhere. And since loudspeakers and furniture making are closely linked, success with loudspeakers would not have been achieved if there had not been a tradition of furniture making to stand on the shoulders of.
Others believe that the Danes have been quick to create acoustics as an independent module in engineering education. Because without skilled engineers, you're not going to get anywhere when you need to supply an industry with bright minds.
I think you can see an unusual combination of creativity and enterprise when you look at a story like Scan Speaks. There is a direct line from the Madsen brothers who would not give up the dream of building loudspeaker units for Bang & Olufsen to today's Scan Speaks, and I will come back to that.
A vibration-damping substance is applied to the diaphragm of the woofer and accurately dosed by syringe.
Entrepreneurship exists all over the world, of course, but there is now a special Danish version with added ingredients such as creativity, openness, simplicity and a special experience of value for the customer. Whether this culture is nascent or dying in today's Denmark, I have no idea.
I believe there must be a short path from the thinker to the creator for crisp innovation to come out of a company. Committees, boards and advisors really need to be sharp and not see their own existence as an end in itself if bold innovation is to come out of a company in its purest form. The Madsen brothers were excellent examples of this, but there are many similar stories of Danish innovation. Common to the stories is the short distance from the thinker to the creator.
Testing of loudspeaker. The grey box is a silenced chamber, with a measurement microphone. All loudspeaker units are tested and the result is displayed on a screen indicating whether the unit has passed.
They are growing in Videbæk
Whether it's the short distance between the desks of the creative development manager, the sales manager and the owner's office that is the reason Scan Speak has the wind in its sails, I can't say, but when I visited them, they had just hired 7 new employees in production.
The reason is a very large order from a Japanese customer, who has ordered 50,000 speaker units from the West Jutland manufacturer. They have some talent in Videbæk. I'll tell you more about them next time when I go into detail about the speaker units for Speaker Q113. Here I will finish with a round-up about Danish speaker units, and you are very welcome to make additions if I have forgotten or overlooked something.
A historical retrospective
Danish loudspeaker units are often seen as part of the interior of well-known Danish and international loudspeaker brands, and often at the expensive end. But Danish speakers also come in the form of loose speaker units that the home builder can try out.
Outside the soundless room of the laboratory is the measuring equipment, including a Brüel & Kjær 2012.
When I started building loudspeakers in the early 80s, there were four factories in Denmark that manufactured loose loudspeaker units. I am thinking of Peerless, Vifa (Videbæk Højttalerfabrik), Scan Speak and Dynaudio.
The latter has undergone a strategic change since the early 1990s, from only developing and manufacturing loudspeaker units for OEMs and other loudspeaker brands, to now being positioned exclusively as a loudspeaker brand with its own loudspeaker units that cannot be purchased by others.
For measurement accuracy, the soundless room is built as a separate building, mechanically decoupled from the rest of the factory. The loudspeaker units are inserted through the square window and three microphones are positioned at 0, 30 and 60 degrees from the axis of the unit.
Videbæk Højttalerfabrik bought Scan Speak in 1989, but continued to develop and sell their own brand Vifa and Scan Speak as separate brands. Vifa as the good and affordable and Scan Speak as the advanced and refined brand. In 2000 Peerless was bought by Videbæk Højttalerfabrik, which was now renamed DST, Danish Sound Technology. The Peerless, Vifa and Scan Speak brands were effectively produced under the same owner.
In 2005, American Tymphany acquired Danish DST with the aim of gaining access to engineering know-how and, not least, experience in the production of advanced loudspeaker units. The Americans brought with them the "speaker of the future", the patented LAT, which they wanted to use the Danes' knowledge of loudspeakers to achieve commercial and technological success. Unfortunately, the financial crisis meant that the Americans ran out of money and had to reduce their investment so much that today the Peerless and Vifa brands are in American hands but produced in China. The Americans have no activities in Denmark anymore and the speaker of the future became nothing but the past.
Thiele / Small parameters. In Scan Speaks laboratory Thiele/Small parameters are measured with a Brüel & Kjær 1027, and an Agilent 34410 digital multimeter etc.
Scan Speak has been owned since 2009 by CEO. Jan A. Nielsen, three partners and some of the employees. Every year the company supplies speaker units to many of the most renowned speaker brands all over the world, where you will usually find Scan Speak in the expensive top models.
Next time I'll take a closer look at the wild parts that go into the speaker units for the Speaker Q113. If the spirit of millwright N.C. Madsen should pass through the living room, we'll take it ...
The story of N.C. Madsen, who founded Videbæk Højttalerfabrik, comes from Magnus Nesdam, who followed as the company's second director. He set out to tell the factory's story in words, but did not finish it before his death. A valuable chapter about companies in Denmark thus remains untold, but there will be help available at Scan Speak for anyone who wants to pick up the thread and finish the story. An invitation is hereby extended.
