GENELEC AT 45 EVOLVING THE SCIENCE OF SOUND

Genelec is headquartered in Iisalmi, Finland. The town, in Northern Savonia, is a magnet for outdoors sports enthusiasts, and the kind of folk keen to explore nature. It’s surrounded by lakes and rivers which, at the time of our interview, are frozen over. “The ice is 50-60cm thick. It gets down to -7c at the moment,” Genelec CEO Siamäk Naghian confides, wearing a scarf in his office.

We’re talking over a conference call. Naghian’s office wall is covered in art, bright and colourful. A cursory glance might lead you to think they are outlandish concepts from his engineering team, but a closer look reveals they’re kids drawings.

“They’re by our colleague’s children,” smiles Naghian. “I think they’re beautiful.” He says that he hopes to exhibit the children’s handiwork in the Genelec factory.

Of the picturesque surroundings, he adds: “It’s so close to forest and water; we have a lot of snow but there’s also a lot of light and sunshine. Before COVID I travelled a lot. Sometimes I would be in Beijing for a week or two, and while it was very nice to be with people, our partners and friends, I was really glad to come back to nature, to be in the middle of it. I’m really thankful for that.” The irony that Finland’s best known audio company operates in such a quiet, idyllic environment isn’t lost on the CEO.

“Silence is actually a very essential part of sound,” he says, “especially when we talk about pure sound, because that is our reference. That is where everything starts, and the closer you get to that silence, the greater the purity of sound. Bandwidth is not about numbers, but how close you are to silence…”

AMI: 45 years is an impressive anniversary for the company. Over that period you’ve won multiple awards and your reach is global. You became Director of Research and Development at Genelec in the mid-noughties, and have been an audio pioneer for nearly 20 years. You’ve overseen plenty of changes - but what hasn’t changed at Genelec over the years?

Siamäk Naghian: That’s an excellent question, because not every change is positive! What has not changed from the beginning is the basic philosophy of the company, our passion for sound, our mission! If you look at how things evolve, there are some changes that are actually negative. You have to always take care of what keeps things evolving. You have to know yourself, who you want to be, and what you don’t want to be. For Genelec, there are things that have not changed and I hope that they will not change; we don’t need to make bad compromises for financial reasons, just to make somebody happy, because we are financially independent. At the same time, you have to listen to your customers, to your users. I have learned in an engineering way, that you need to listen to your environment. You listen to those signals, and then you make your own signal. There has to be some uniqueness about what you want to do to help your customers.

AMI: That said, technology has changed dramatically over the past forty years or so. The audio landscape today would be unrecognisable to the Genelec that launched in the late Seventies…

I have an S30 studio monitor in my office, it was our first product. If you open that model, it’s from a totally different world. Whereas The Ones (the brand’s current point source monitor family), have so much technology inside they’re getting closer to becoming a computer. Even at the time that I joined, we did not have any product with a single line of software code. Now that’s the opposite. There is no single product that doesn’t have software inside it. The majority of the work that we do, in terms of research and development and product development, is about software algorithms - embedded software and signal processing, networking software, the user interface and different kinds of software.

AMI: The way creators are making music now has also fundamentally changed. How do you see the changing role of sound production in society?

If you look at music production, with the computer becoming the centre of everything, basically everybody now has the possibility to create music at home. So with a couple of monitor speakers, or headphones, audio software, an audio interface and the internet, you can produce music and you can distribute it. For a company like us, it’s very important that we’re involved in this process and contribute to its development.

AMI: Did this progression bring its own set of challenges?

If you look at manufacturing, society and the electronic industry right now, where we are globally, and where we were 30 years ago, the ecosystem has totally changed. In Finland, one of the biggest industries used to be electronics, mainly because of the mobile phone industry. But today you’ll have problems finding people who really know that industry, that have the knowledge and the competencies needed for that kind of thing. It is very exceptional that we have an electronic production line here in our factory, and sometimes it’s very difficult to find people who can give service to those lines, because that industry has, to a large extent, disappeared. On the other hand, if you look at our customer base, it has been growing drastically, and at the same time, there is a large variation of users, expectations and applications.

AMI: Obviously COVID accelerated the move to home-based music production, but did the speed of transition take you by surprise?

You are absolutely right, it was a development that we couldn’t have anticipated - but during the time before the COVID outbreak we had started having some kind of awareness.I have been travelling to China since the Nineties, where we have been working with TV and radio stations, music production and so on, first with a distributor before establishing our own operation in 2005, to focus on education, marketing, and distribution. Now we have a highly professional local team there. Before Covid there was some news that there was some kind of unknown virus. Very quickly, I started to wonder what if this spreads globally? We started to plan for that. If this became a kind of global pandemic, how would we operate? We were preparing for a crisis, but a few months into the pandemic, we suddenly realised that lockdown had created a huge demand for our products. That was totally unexpected. The people in our industry, and community, had started to work from home and they needed good quality products. Will the situation ever return to where we were? I think that’s not limited to our community, that is a general question. I feel that these days it is very difficult to see your colleagues. I come in (to the office) almost every day because of production and people, but it has changed. I don’t expect that the work situation will return to something that resembles life before COVID. People are now moving between the home and studio. I think we are in a new situation. It’s an important development.

AMI: The rise of membership-based recording and creative hubs, like London’s Tileyard X complex, may well become the preferred recording solution to musicians, DJs and producers in the near future; a more causal, transitory hub. Could this be another new boom area for Genelec?

Absolutely! It’s a most interesting area. The whole point is that when people come together, what kind of dynamic will that create? I think that is very interesting. And there is another new background factor that has become very important, and that is cloud storage and networking. Basically you can move from one place to another and you can do your job without having to carry everything yourself. Your work, and the contents that you have, can follow you wherever you go. I think that this is a trend that will become bigger and bigger.

AMI: 45 years in, it seems there remains plenty of scope for innovation. What can we expect to see over the next 12 months?

In terms of new technology, we are planning to unveil something very interesting in May – at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference in Helsinki – so look out for that. But throughout the whole of this anniversary year we’ve organised the Genelec 45 World Tour. This is a global series of face-to-face, virtual and hybrid ‘Experience’ events where our customers can listen to, and learn about, our technology. Additionally we’re running the Genelec Harmony Tracks contest that invites anyone in the world to submit a piece of music using their own unique style, sound and culture, to help us celebrate – and to support our charity partners. We want this 45th year to celebrate truthful sound and the passion that powers it, with our customers right at the heart of the activities.

AMI: You recently released Aural ID, a personalised plugin for workstations. The DAW plugin creates a personalised HRTF profile, so that headphone wearers can enjoy a listening experience similar to a conventional loudspeaker soundstage. What more can you tell us about this project?

I think there will be a lot of development in this area. With Aural ID you can create a sense of externalisation while wearing headphones. The problem with headphones, even high quality models, is that sounds come from inside your head. You don’t have a sense of space, which is very, very important for sound (reproduction). This technology will actually take headphone listening to the next level, especially when it comes to immersive audio, which is another interesting trend that is happening very, very quickly in production.

Using very efficient computer modelling, we can come up with an HRTF which is totally personal, and the quality is on a par with what you would get based on the acoustically measured personal HRTF in the lab. That basically means that you can reproduce immersive audio in your headphones, with an experience much closer to an actual immersive loudspeaker system, and move seamlessly between them. I would say that the bridge between the reference audio monitoring system and headphone monitoring is one of the most exciting new areas for us. I’m 100 per cent sure that such headphone development is going to continue.

AMI: You must take great satisfaction that artists around the world put their faith in Genelec hardware and appreciate that what you’ve done is helping their creative process…

Well, I think now we are getting to the reason why I do this job! It’s essentially connected to what I said in the beginning of our interview: our mission is to help people fulfil their dreams as artists and producers. We are basically dealing with high technology and art. It is beautiful.

Ultimately this is the best recognition you can get, to know that people are using Genelec to create, to feel that they have made something special. What could be better? What could be more rewarding?

AMI: We notice you use recycled cabinets – given your locality and connection to the natural world, how does sustainability fit into your plans now and in the future and what do you think the industry could do to better meet targets?

Yes, the use of recycled aluminium for our cabinets has been one of our most significant innovations, but it is not the only sustainability-related step that we have taken during the history of the company. From day one, sustainability has been a vital part of the company design and manufacturing philosophy. Decades ago, we defined that sustainability is equally important to us as sound quality and profitability. This principle is applied when choosing the material, across the operational process, and covers the lifetime of our products. The fact that even our first studio monitor, the S30 from 1978, is still widely in use, is something unique that is the result of such a principle. We think that although this was a visionary approach decades ago, it has now become rather imperative due to climate change. Together with the rest of the industry, we have to take bigger actions to minimise the footprint of what we do in order to save the planet for future generations. It is not about a choice taken by a few, but a ‘must do’ for all of us.

AMI: The lifespan of speakers is good of course, so do you feel it’s a battle of serving all systems via software that’s the key to being sustainable from a lifecycle point of view? It seems to be the biggest issue in smartphone tech, for example.

Especially for active monitor loudspeakers, to guarantee a long lifetime we have to really consider the choices we make during the design process. With active technology’s integrated electronics, we must carefully design the electronics as the core of the design to ensure longevity. At the same time, we need to keep our designs up-to-date with the development pace of the electronics industry, including digital technology. This also gives us the possibility of splitting the functionality of the entire system, which supports a long product lifetime by providing a robust platform onto which we can keep updating products via the software domain. While we think that software can help support the long lifetime of products in the future, we have to keep Design For Sustainability (DFS) as the foundation for the total design – including hardware and software – backed up by technical support to keep the products sustainable well into the future.