SHANNON BECKER: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
BOB KATZ: Curious would best describe me. Curious has acted as a passport to exploring a great many things in my professional career as well as all I do after I punch out at the end of the day. Curiosity drives exploration and exploration drives innovation and invention. The platform that I have been using for decades has been industrial design product development.
My brand of industrial design has always involved elements larger than just simple product development. Strategy development encompasses the product being developed of course, but I also need to consider the product within a larger construct with useful innovation acting as the corner stone. When the work I have done falls into complete alignment, it involves personifying new technologies that surprise and change how we interact with our tools by making the tools more useful and meaningful. This has been the case for numerous products and technologies developed over several decades, but none quite as compelling at what we have here at Revolution Acoustics.
SHANNON: How did you become interested in audio electronics?
BOB: Electronics has always been something I enjoyed. I designed products for some audio brands, and I was curious to learn more when I stumbled on vibrational loudspeaker technology. My research showed that this technology had the potential to be a real industry game changer. It also showed no one was really delivering a dependable commercial-grade solution that provided power and fidelity. It was a very difficult problem to solve.
SHANNON: How has your product strategy development experience helped you?
transforms nearly any panel structure into an audio speaker.
BOB: My background in product strategy development has helped me design new products. My culture is not aligned with traditional audio product engineering, which is often steeped in incrementalism. Advancing technology in little spurts has been how traditional audio technologies have reached, for example, the level of refinement we see in two-channel audio products. My perspective has been one borne from the requirement to innovate using different thinking, and unabashedly bring about paradigm shifts through technology and design. In my work at Revolution Acoustics, the focus has been on nontraditional materials, product topologies, and methods to advance underdeveloped theories of acoustics physics. From my background in product strategy development, I found I could be bring change to the industry and ultimately improve how people interact with audio.
SHANNON: Tell us about your company Revolution Acoustics (www.revolutionacoustics.com)?
BOB: The name “Revolution Acoustics” really does characterize the company’s philosophies and products. I launched the company as more of a research and development firm in the hope we could find a breakthrough in invisible vibrational speakers. The breakthroughs did happen, but as with most complex problems, this took quite some time. Revolution Acoustics was focused on developing a solution for invisible vibrational speakers, and that led us to embedded bending wave flat panel physics and all it could be possibly render. Referencing the name of the company, I optimistically leaned on my past background of successfully bringing positive change. Based on the theories, success would truly bring a revolution in the industry making the rules of engagement for all audio specifiers inordinately easier and provide results we had only dreamed of in the past.
Early prototypes were very promising in that we distinguished ourselves by designing a good full-frequency invisible transducer. It was missing a bit on higher frequencies but our first-generation transducers had bass! A lot of it. Undaunted, and still unsatisfied, I steered the company into another R&D cycle using the experience gained with the first generation solutions.
Experience brought a good grounding in the domain of invisible transducers, which allowed us to hypothesize what was needed to perfect the technologies. A new design was developed responding to our proprietary information. Once we took the first production articles to the National Research Council’s anechoic chamber for testing, the results exceeded even our most optimistic expectation. Numerous patents have been issued demonstrating the innovative nature of the solutions.
optimize the output of Revolution Acoustics
SSP6 Multiducer. On board digital sound
processing has been utilized in specific and
proprietary ways to cause materials
(e.g., glass, drywall, metal, fiberglass, and wood)
to become hi-fi speakers.
SHANNON: What kind of audio products does Revolution Acoustics offer?
BOB: Revolution Acoustics provides the simplest, and I would argue the best performing invisible speaker (transducer) solutions available. I speak of the SSP6 Multiducer. This is coupled with our RA2 intelligent daisy chainable stereoblock amplifiers. Because we manufacture sound that is incredibly even in both content (frequency response) and sound pressure levels (SPL), we have expanded into sound masking/office solutions with our QSM-3 multicontroller. This technology is coupled with our invisible CR-2 and CR-4 ceiling acoustic radiator panels, used in all standard drop ceilings.
The challenges were significant to conceive products of this caliber. The objective, of course, is to produce an audio product able to generate fidelity and power. This gives rise to a full-frequency response including bass, which is very difficult, and nearly impossible using product architectures used by other invisible transducer solutions. Subwoofers are needed, which greatly diminishes the value proposition.
Revolution Acoustics delivers commercial audio in that the sound can be specified by professionals reliably rendering real performance to solve the problem sets the specifiers are mandated to solve. This requires not only fidelity but power at times. Typically, control is lost and the driver distorts. Our patented technology uses the new physics to solve these problems rendering simple solutions for commercial and residential audio needs. Our sound is surprising industry professionals because for the first time transducers deliver powerful, crisp, and accurate response. We are changing perceptions regarding the transducer category.
multicontroller for sound masking/office solutions.
BOB: The SSP6 Invisible Multiducer solves just about every legacy issue of conventional speaker drivers. That said, the differences are quite remarkable. The SSP6 creates massively large radiating speakers that change how sound is produced and how the listener interfaces with the sound field. Traditional cone speakers are hot -point sources that beam high-frequency content, create acoustically bright spots under (or in front of) the speaker and then produce acoustically shadowed areas in between speakers. It’s a manic experience of loud and soft with content that varies in response.
Cone speakers also have a very limited effective sound field or “near field,” which we refer to as the sweet spot. Before the sweet spot the sound is uncomfortable in its intensity, and after the sweet spot, the sound rapidly diminishes as it sound pressure rolls off logarithmically. It’s simply what cone type speaker topologies do. It’s a by-product of the physics associated with conventional loudspeakers.
The physics Revolution Acoustics uses is different. Our products magically produce the opposite of every legacy characteristic stated earlier. Well, maybe not magically, but let’s say it’s due to well-applied science and engineering. Sound is evenly propagated in frequencies everywhere in the room, as well SPL.
Of course, the SSP6 is also invisible—it is what we and consider as the new form factor. We are also able to produce a new concept we call Ergonomic Audio. The SSP6 creates very large planer radiators, which are not point-source emitters as are conventional speakers. That causes our sound to be comfortable close to the speaker. It is able to project accurate content with perfect detail at greater distances than a cone-type speaker can deliver, and make the entire room become “the sweet spot.” Separate the SSP6 Multiducers and imaging and staging feel natural without the edge of a conventional speaker. Two SSP6 Multiducers can actually replace six and even up to eight conventional speakers, delivering a real value proposition. All of this with a 2-min installation process per Multiducer.
SSP 6 Multiducers wired with high-quality speaker
cables, an RA2 intelligent digital amplifier,
all the connecting cables, an IR sensor,
remote control, and an iPod.
SHANNON: You also have a company called Katz Design (www.katzdesign.com). How does this company fit with Revolution Acoustics?
BOB: Some of the philosophies of Katz Design as well as some of the innovation capabilities have been borrowed for Revolution Acoustics. I polished my product strategy skills at Katz Design for decades and provide simple and effective solutions for complex and varied problem sets. The philosophy is to solve problems not through incremental nudges but through revolutionary steps and bring substantial value starting with the end user’s experience.
SHANNON: What do you have planned for Revolution Acoustics’s future?
BOB: Revolution Acoustics’s future is pretty bright in that our innovation road map is quite extensive. Innovation will always quietly hum in the background until our next technology is ready to be brought into the world. After all, we started as an R&D firm, and innovation is at our core. For the time being, we have the task of teaching audio specifiers and end users that there is a revolution afoot—Invisible audio with surprising performance, ease of installation, and true value.
