I’ve never seen loudspeaker design as a separate discipline from music production. To me, it’s the same conversation, just at a different stage of the signal chain.
At some point I stopped asking which loudspeaker sounded best and started wondering why they sounded different in the first place.
That question eventually led me to designing my own.
I’ve been fascinated by sound and technology ever since I was a teenager. In the early 1990s, my biggest influences weren’t school mates or magazines, it came from clandestine culture, late-night foreign television and radio.
My parents refused to get cable TV, which meant no MTV. Instead, growing up near Lake Constance on the borders of Germany, Switzerland and Austria had one unexpected advantage: we could receive television and radio from all three countries. Austrian television and Swiss radio became my window into another world.
One Sunday morning, after secretly recording the ORF show X-Large Nacht on my father’s Beta recorder, I sat down before breakfast to watch the tapes from the night before. That’s when I first saw the Stereo MCs performing in front of huge bass woofers and discovered artists like The Orb, Altern 8 and Massive Attack. That morning completely changed my life.
Suddenly I knew there was a world where music, technology and visual culture belonged together, and I wanted to spend my live sourrounded by that.
Funny enough, only a few years later I met the Stereo MC's when I travelled to London with Johnny from Gecko in Ravensburg - he now runs club Douala - in the summer of 1993. I couldn’t speak English back then, so I mostly sat quietly watching the band building beats on an Atari ST with an Akai S1000 sampler.
The loops and rhythms they were cooking up completely fascinated me. Ever since I’ve been obsessed with understanding how sound and technology works.
As a producer, mixing engineer and lifelong “soundy” (to borrow Andreas Dorau’s wonderful invention for our never realized music project "Soundy & Derb"), designing loudspeakers feels less like learning something new and more like continuing the same craft from another perspective.
To me finishing a loudspeaker is surprisingly similar to finishing a record. Although non of it is never really finished.
In both cases you’re trying to create the most natural, direct and emotionally convincing listening experience from a collection of individual elements.
When mixing a song those elements are most of the time drums, bass, synths, percussion and maybe voice. Using EQ, dynamic and time-based sonic tools, they gradually become one coherent piece of music.
With loudspeakers the ingredients are different but the process feels quite familiar. Drivers replace instruments, wooden cabinets become resonating bodies, and DSP is the tool that allows shaping how everything harmonizes together. Ultimately, both disciplines are about producing moving air in the most convincing way possible.
That mindset - plus the need for a bigger system in our event space - is what led me to finally begin designing my own systems.
My first loudspeaker project (P1) started as a practical challenge. I wanted to build something that sounded good but also visually belonged inside our Lovers & Leaders community and event space in Berlin-Mitte.
The current project (P2) takes that idea much further. My goal was to create a loudspeaker that isn’t just a beautiful object but a true studio-quality monitoring and event system, equally comfortable during intimate listening sessions and small concerts inside our 101-square-metre space.
Technically, P2 is inspired by late 1970's Electro-Voice design philosophy: a TL606 box with a 15" woofer combined with a large handmade white HR90 fibreglass horn sitting proudly on top. It's more of a large studio monitor design like the Sentry III then a PA system.
After experimenting with passive crossovers I eventually decided to build the system around modern DSP. It simply gives me the precision I was looking for and naturally connects with the way I’ve been working throughout my career as a producer and mixing engineer.
Spending fifteen years at Native Instruments also fundamentally changed how I think about sound and technology. I was lucky enough to spend countless conversations with instrument & sound designers and software & DSP engineers whose way of thinking pushed me to understand audio on a much deeper level.
Those years also taught me that engineering and creativity are never opposites, they constantly inform one another. And NI most importantly tought me that there is not one solution, that it's not about digital or analog, or having lots of gear. It's about training your ears and building trust in your own decisions. The rest is just tools and gadgets.
So after spending almost two decades focusing primarily on software instruments, studio tools and music production, I now find myself deep inside the rabbit hole of loudspeaker design.
That doesn’t mean my fascination with instruments and studio gear has disappeared. It’s simply another angle from which to explore the same subject.
I genuinely enjoy studying the mathematics behind acoustics, measurements and cabinet design. But what excites me most is hearing those ideas suddenly become physical.
Most listening tests happen with my own productions, both old and new, but also together with friends and fellow producers. Recently DJ, producer and label-boss Daniel Haaksman and I listened to the first vinyl test pressing of Canto Diaspora, his beautiful forty-piece female choir project released through Man Recordings.
Looking back, building loudspeakers feels less like starting a new hobby and more like continuing the same journey that began when I first discovered electronic music as a teenager.
Music doesn’t stop when the track is finished.
It ends the moment sound reaches people in exactly the way you imagined.
Once moving air becomes movement, relaxation, emotion or simply puts a smile on somebody’s face, the sonic creator feels proud and fullfilled.
I’m looking forward to sharing the system publicly over the coming months. The first opportunity will already be on 15 August 2026, when my new five-piece improvisational Krautrock project performs an eight-hour session at the Lovers & Leaders space.
References
+ Stereo MC's Lost in Music
+ Electro Voice Sentry III
+ Canto Diaspora on Man Recordings