Back in 1977 Dynaudio’s founder, Wilfried Ehrenholz, decided that the off-the-shelf speakers he’d been listening to weren’t telling the whole truth. Dynaudio started out by putting drivers made by other companies into tweaked off-the-shelf cabinets, with crossovers made in-house. But they still weren’t Right: it wasn’t all made in-house. And we all know there’s only one way to get something Right if no one else can do it…
“Whatever I do, I want to make a perfect thing. I talked to a lot of other engineers at the time, and I could see how limited their understanding of speaker technology was,” says Wilfried. “So we did it ourselves.”
That obsession with The Truth set them on the path to Right-ness. They began in Skanderborg, Denmark. It’s a small town by a lake; you’d like it, it’s lovely. And because there isn’t an awful lot to do in Skanderborg, they turned their attention to making the most honest speakers possible. That meant total transparency: simply reproducing the music that was fed to them from the original performance.
The drivers available at the time just weren’t good enough, so they built their own – but it wasn’t just a test-the-water-and-dive-in job. They did their homework. Dynaudio was always striving to reach the next level; a level its established competitors – some of whom were leviathans of the hi-fi industry – either couldn’t get to, or hadn’t even realised existed. Their goal? To stop picking apart frequencies and just… sit. Listen. Enjoy.
“If a musician expresses what’s in the music, when you listen to it you aren’t analyzing it, it’s just emotion,” Wilfried says.
That philosophy – that pursuit of truth through emotion – permeates the entire company. There’s always another level to hit. VP of Innovation Mark Thorup and Wilfried have been working side by side for decades – and they still agree on one thing: they’re living their passion and making a business of it.
“We’re not doing it because we must. We’re doing it because we can,” says Mark. “When I think back, I can’t understand how I have been so brave! When we started, I was only 22 years old, no experience, no background, just finished my studies – but I never had any doubt that we would be successful. We never did anything just for the money. Ever. I thought we might build a company with 30, 40 people or so, but it went better than I thought!”
It’s always been this way, ever since we started in one building in 1977, with a handful of employees. Now we have nearly 300… and they’re all fussy. Just as it should be. Our people are the key to everything we do: they know exactly how to create quality. They test, and listen, and test, and refine, and listen. They’re experts. It means if something isn’t right, we can fix it – not just change something else further down the line and hope it solves the problem. We do it at the beginning.