A sound idea

GROTON -- The room at Moulton Labs is only few miles outside Boston, but it seems light years away from the iPods of the MP3 generation. In each corner are strange mechanical beasts, looking like children of Rosie the Robot and a few Daleks from Dr. Who. According to audio guru David Moulton, they represent the latest generation of the most important musical instrument of the 20th century: the loudspeaker.

Moulton, 62, is well respected in the music and audio industries. He has produced recordings for Sonny Rollins, received a Grammy nomination, and won kudos as a composer, acoustical designer, author, and educator. But fathering these BeoLab 5 loudspeakers marks his proudest hour. He claims they will do for home entertainment what the orchestra did for live music.

Moulton isn't the only one who thinks the futuristic loudspeaker sets a new standard. Time magazine picked the BeoLab 5 as one of 2003's coolest inventions. The tech innovation "blew us away," wrote Popular Science. In one blind test, an expert panelist protested that a real guitarist was playing live behind the screen hiding the BeoLab 5s. "It's a sonic ecosystem," says Sean MacLean, a classical composer and assistant producer at WGBH. "This would be an embarrassingly new age thing to say if I hadn't heard it with my own ears."

The BeoLab 5 is a state-of-the-art digital loudspeaker manufactured by Bang & Olufsen, the Danish audio company known for high-style minimalism. In 1997, B&O teamed with Moulton and Manny LaCarrubba, his partner in Sausalito Audio Works, to develop a speaker using their new "Acoustic Lens" technology. B&O unveiled the BeoLab 5 in its stores late last year, 20 years after Moulton's first prototypes.

Envisioned as a rock 'n' roll speaker, it has an appearance that emulates a stacked set of drum cymbals. Each four-way, 2,500-watt, self-powered, self-calibrating speaker features complex electronic processing and two ellipse-based lenses. What does that mean? Though some receivers can tune themselves to a room, this is the first loudspeaker to electronically adjust to its room position and acoustically match itself to its siblings. That significantly improves bass response. And unlike conventional stereo speakers, which have a narrow, centered "sweet spot," it delivers full-spectrum sound throughout the room.

"It's an everywhere speaker," explains Robert Domos, a manager at B&O's Newbury Street store, where the BeoLab 5s once popped a ceiling fixture in an adjacent room. "You can break a lease with these," he asserts.

At $16,000 a pair, they won't be "everywhere speakers" for everyone, especially fans accustomed to carrying around their entire music collection on a fidelity-compromised MP3 player. Top-shelf audiophiles, on the other hand, hardly blink at price tags of $25,000 to $50,000 and more for an exotic pair of high-performance boutique speakers. So for the sonic holy grail that some think the BeoLab 5 has unearthed, it's apparently worth every penny.

If that's too expensive, the $3,000 BeoLab 3, about the size of an ostrich egg, will be out this spring. Moulton sees the BeoLab technology soon trickling down to the average listener. It can spread the "sweet spot" to all riders in a car, pump up the extended low end of hip-hop performances, and vastly enhance the sensation of envelopment in a surround system.

Moulton's passion for building a better loudspeaker can be traced to his first love, composing. He studied composition at Juilliard in the 1960s with some big names: Vincent Persichetti, Luciano Berio, and Roger Sessions. "I wanted to be Beethoven when I grew up," he says. Intrigued by new technologies, he began performing with synthesizer and tape recorder. "I noticed that when I used really good loudspeakers it was easier to perform," he says. He began to regard the loudspeaker as his main compositional tool, and the BeoLab 5 grew out of his need to upgrade -- in rock 'n' roll parlance -- his axe.

After Juilliard, Moulton retreated upstate to a farmhouse where, tiring of his status as starving composer, he began teaching music at area schools and built a modest recording studio in his living room "in the finest hippie tradition," he says. There, he tutored jazz legend Sonny Rollins on synthesizers, produced a Christmas album for NRBQ, and worked with the Concord String Quartet. Moulton's varied skills as teacher, composer, engineer, producer, and audio theorist were soon parlayed into a full-time position at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

"Dave is a polymath," says composer-producer MacLean, who produced Moulton's 2002 sound sculpture installation "Gift of Sound." "If he weren't so fascinated by his friends, tender to their foibles, moved by the physical world, addicted to fast cars, then Dave Moulton would be a nerd. If he hadn't pursued the Aristotelian, well-balanced life of the mind, he'd be a jock race-car driver. Dave is neither because he is that rare being in America today -- a generalist."

In 1982, Moulton and a physics professor at Fredonia were issued a patent for a loudspeaker reflection device that they had sketched out on a lunchroom napkin the previous year. Meanwhile, Moulton started work on a speaker that sent sound horizontally in all directions. Though these 360-degree prototypes never made it out of Moulton's basement -- "They were a mistake," he says -- listening to them prompted an epiphany.

"The illusions were so striking and different. I had to start over in my understanding of how humans localize and perceive sound," Moulton says. His new research found that "early reflections" of high frequencies -- like sonic billiard balls bouncing off walls and objects in a room -- play a major part in the way humans hear. The first sound waves that reach us, the early reflections, help us figure out the location of the source.

Though two companies sold a few thousand speakers using it, the original napkin design now conflicted with some of Moulton's developing theories. He took a break from working on speakers to concentrate on his new position as chairman of the music production and engineering department at Berklee College of Music. Still, he believed his research principles were correct, even though they went against the common wisdom of the audio industry at the time. Eventually he teamed up with recording engineer LaCarrubba, a former student of his from Fredonia, who had purchased one of the original speakers and set out to develop Moulton's ideas. "It was almost like a calling," says LaCarrubba, who went on to become chief engineer at The Plant, a recording studio near San Francisco. "I spent a tremendous amount of time outside the studio working on it." Together, he and Moulton worked their way through new speaker designs, revisions, and failures -- including one colossal rebuff during testing at the National Research Council in Canada in 1991. "We got our lunches handed to us in our own blind tests," Moulton says.

"We thought we had the world's greatest speaker," LaCarrubba recalls. "Then the world's foremost expert in loudspeaker evaluation told me he doubted such a device could ever work. And since I was just plain too young and stupid to take his good advice, I became determined to prove him wrong."

One night a few years later, LaCarrubba called Moulton with a message: "Bingo." He had a speaker lens design that finally realized his partner's idea. That idea was that loudspeakers should have flat (even) frequency response in a full 180-degree horizontal arc swinging in front of the speakers. Further, Moulton theorized that only high-frequency sounds coming from in front of the listener are useful.

"Our hearing is one of the oldest senses," Moulton says, "predating humans and common to all mammals. I can't prove it, but my speculation is that it developed underwater. Hearing reflections of sound was a primary navigation aid. In tidal waters, horizontal localization is really important. Vertical doesn't matter, because overhead is safe; it's a non-place. Anything from above or below is merely confusing. What we really want is just limitless verticality."

Moulton couldn't prove it, but Bang & Olufsen did. Their three-year, $5 million Archimedes project to study psycho-acoustics, started in 1988, established principles that paralleled Moulton's theses. The project director for Archimedes suggested that Bang & Olufsen talk to Moulton, whom he'd met at Berklee. B&O senior manager Poul Praestgaard remembers the first time he heard Moulton and LaCarrubba's loudspeaker, in 1996 in a hotel room in Los Angeles. "I was very skeptical but quickly realized we were listening to something exceptional," Praestgaard says. "It had a unique openness and an orchestral impact. The speaker was ugly, with a barrel-shaped bass section and hand-molded acoustic lenses of clay on top. But I knew we could deal with that." B&O saw the unconventional design and complex technology as an interesting challenge. After six more years of development and testing, Moulton finally has his dream axe.

During the countdown to the first BeoLab 5, Moulton kept busy. He earned a Grammy nomination in 2000 for his work on a new surround-sound recording of George Crumb's "Ancient Voices of Children." In 2002, he mounted "Gift of Sound" for the Boston Sculptor's Group. Featuring four pieces of slowly evolving, densely layered electronica, "Gift" was inspired by Monet's water lily paintings at the Musee Marmottan in Paris. "I saw those paintings and I heard, quite clearly, the kind of music I'd wanted to write for 40 years," he says. Mouton is well into his follow-up, "The Book of Hours," premiering later this year. With another set of BeoLab 5s on the way, he'll be equipped to take his surround-sound show on the road.

"I'm trying to write music directly for this new instrument," Moulton says. "Physically, that's exactly what speakers are -- instruments which make music. In 1900, essentially no music was played on loudspeakers. One hundred years later, 99 percent of all music is played on them. But when we listen to loudspeakers, we don't hear them; we have a blind spot. We say, no, that's a violin, that's a piano. But we're actually listening to the speaker, not a piano. What is probably the most significant event in music history has not even been acknowledged.

"I used to joke around with my students. An electric guitar is not that thing with a wire coming off it that guitarists hold and play. It's that little black box, the Fender amp sitting next to them, that's making the sound. The amplified speaker, that's the actual electric guitar. The thing the guy is playing is really an electric guitar controller."

While we wait for his BeoLab technology to gentrify the lo-fi end of audiotown, Moulton wants to narrow the MP3 generation gap. Increasingly, the style of music one listens to can dictate the type of system used to listen, and vice versa. "It's a sociological thing, kind of a split between entertainment elitists and the mass market," he says. Since most rap, pop, and rock recordings are already heavily processed, they more easily translate to an average MP3, which contains only 9 percent of the material stored on a track on a stereo CD. But such extreme compression is deadly for acoustic music like jazz and classical. "At present, there's hardly any awareness of the loss in quality that occurs from fast downloads or making multiple MP3 copies," Moulton says. "The kids have almost no idea of what they are missing."

He hopes his planned clinics on sound for high schoolers will open some ears. Perhaps a listen on the BeoLab 5s to Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" could change their perspectives and raise their sound-quality bar. "Once they hear the difference, they go, `Oh, I really didn't understand.' "