11 Questions with Wilfried Ehrenholz ------------- March April 2017 Issue!

1. The moment of epiphany that prompted the birth of Dynaudio?

Since I’ve been a kid, I have always been excited about music and all kinds of technology. I started playing musical instruments very early on in life and spent all my pocket money on audio equipment, looking for the best sound quality. When I was about 22 years, I learnt that time domain, phase and transient response is extremely important for a speaker system. At that time, nobody cared about this aspect. All speakers were optimized only in frequency response. This has been my initial motivation to start a new company.

2. The highlight of your career of almost four decades?

My ambition has always been quality, regardless of the cost. I did not expect too much business and I had envisioned it to be a small specialized audio company. But over time Dynaudio became one of the most important players in the Hifi business and beside Hifi products we established the company in professional and automotive as well. The fact that a brand that lays complete emphasis and focus on Quality can become so successful has been a great experience.

3.Your definition of a “good design” in studio monitors?

A studio monitor is a working tool. It shall enable us to make recording as perfect as possible. Therefore a monitor should have as less as possible its own character. At Dynaudio we follow or believe: Just reproduce the truth.

4. Many a times, mix and mastering engineers require a pretty flat and accurate frequency response in their monitors, whereas artists prefer some color to their sound. Have Dynaudio products been able to balance these two diverse needs?

We at Dynaudio have clear guidelines as described above. We believe in our motto that “The reproduction of music should be a real as possible.” If a speaker has certain coloration to it then you will never know how well it will balance the sound with the speakers that the listeners use in their homes.

A monitor with its own characteristic will make it difficult to control the final mixing.

5. With regards to the design parameters in studio monitoring, has anything changed in the last decade?

We had in the Pro world in the 90s, many big studios with huge main monitors. Mixing consoles and the whole setup has been very expensive and only big players could afford with it, but this has now changed totally. With hard disk recording, you can create a nice production with a PC and some affordable software. Today we have many small studios and many musicians make their own recordings. This has changed the monitor market as well. We at Dynaudio today sell mainly small monitors instead of big systems.

6. Has the size of the studio impacted the models that are popular or successful from Dynaudio?

Yes, I have mentioned this change already. When we came out with our small BM5 monitor it was a great success and has maybe influenced the market trend as well.

7. What new innovation in the last decade has impacted studio monitoring performance and features?

When we started in studio business, most of the speakers were passive speakers, but today nearly all speakers are active. That’s a great development because in active speakers, especially DSP based systems we can control many more parameters than in the old analog world. The challenge is to understand the “Know-How” to use DSP in the right way. 15 years ago, the Dynaudio AIR System had been the first totally digital based networking monitor and for many years there was no alternative to this solution. Today all our speakers are based on this long experience. Working in the digital domain has enabled us to reach new levels of performance.

8. Do you think studio monitoring is shifting to the headphone?

I’m not the real specialist in the studio world, but from my point of view, headphones can help to optimize the recording but should not be the only listening tool. In the real world, maybe more music is heard with headphones (or earplugs in terrible quality) than with real speakers.

9. Your favourite model in Dynaudio?

This depends totally on the setup, room size, studio or listening room, acoustics etc. All Dynaudio speakers have the same characteristic (which is no characteristic), so you can enjoy music even with the smallest model impressively.

10. The most common monitoring mistake people make?

Too many productions are made to please a certain taste or a bad quality setup, like in a car for instance or with poor earplugs. Fortunately, we have many excellent recordings as well.

11. How do you perceive the Indian market in terms of taste, color and spice (in sound)?

I know that there is a huge production of music and films in India and Dynaudio will be a bigger part of this in the future because we are improving our effort to cover this market. I’m not concerned about the taste because the neutral Dynaudio reproduction fits all markets in the same way.