Meet Your Maker: Michael Hedges of Monitor Audio

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, British manufacturer, Monitor Audio, unveiled the Concept 50 prototype loudspeaker at the High End Show in Munich in 2022.

Last year, it launched the production version of that product, Hyphn, which was tested here, will set you back £70,000 for a pair.

Monitor Audio says it’s the most creatively ambitious, technically advanced and powerful loudspeaker it’s ever made.

Hyphn, which has an unusual and striking design, takes its name from the architectural term ‘hyphen’ – a link connecting two separate structures.

Each loudspeaker consists of two pillars, with the ‘hyphen’ between them housing the M-Array – a configuration that’s been developed by Monitor Audio’s in-house engineers and consists of a single high-frequency transducer surrounded by six two-inch midrange drivers.

The six two-inch midrange drivers feature Monitor Audio’s Rigid Diaphragm Technology III (RDT III) cones, which were introduced in 2022.

Each pillar houses a pair of powerful eight-inch bass drivers, facing inwards, in a force-cancelling configuration.

This, says Monitor Audio, results in almost no vibration force from the drivers, either within themselves or being passed into the cabinet.

Hyphn has been engineered to deliver enhanced bass control, response and dynamics, plus exceptional detail through the treble and upper midrange.

To find out more about designing and making its own drive units and the challenges involved, we spoke to Monitor Audio’s technical director, Michael Hedges, at the company’s HQ in Rayleigh, Essex.

SH: Hyphn has a striking design – it’s very different…

MH: Oh, yeah – it’s going to be a bit Marmite. Some people won’t like it.

The moving coil loudspeaker driver was invented by Rice and Kellogg in 1925. How hard is it to continue to innovate in a technology that’s nearly 100 years old?

My background is engineering and transducers. If you go back 50 years, the engineering process was quite manual – you didn’t have computers to do a lot of the work for you.

You designed a drive unit, you tested it and, if it didn’t work, you modified some tooling, re-pressed the cone into a new shape and you tried it.

You did maybe six or seven designs which all had different features and then you did a report to see how those designs differed and came up with a hypothesis to do the next steps.

You’d apply a full engineering and scientific approach to it. You can imagine the amount of time that took and also the cost…

Often, with a hi-fi company in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, they weren’t rolling in lots of cash.

There have been constraints in the industry and it’s not an industry that has a massive amount of research funding.

There are companies in it that do really well and prioritise research but it’s not like the medical industry – you haven’t got billions going into research on how a drive unit works.

Our previous technical director, Dean Hartley, was phenomenal at building drive units, testing them, and understanding and following amazing engineering processes. It was because of him that I came here as a student – he was my mentor.

In the late 2000s, computers were at the point where we could apply the raw physics to a simulation and solve the model.

We were effectively taking the electrical input to a drive unit, running it through the voice coil, simulating the electromagnetics, then the structural mechanics of how that force moves from the voice coil into the cone, and how that propagates into the acoustics.

We can build a model that effectively simulates real physics and, after 100 years, why can we do more now than we’ve ever done before.

It’s because I can take a graduate out of university and within a few years of using the simulation tools, they’re seeing how the physics work – they’re not just guessing.

We have a great, relatively young acoustic engineering team that have come to Monitor Audio over the last 10 years or so – they’re acoustics experts but they’re also simulation experts at heart.

How have changes in materials science influenced Monitor Audio’s product development?

Materials have changed quite a lot – you’ve got refinements in magnet material, like neodymium, which is mass-market. You now get strong grades – Hyphn uses N52, which is the strongest.

For many years, we’ve used lower grade neodymium, because it was expensive enough, but it was still a great move forward. We now use high-grade because there’s more of it and the price has changed.

Glues and adhesives are important – the chemistry around those is a place that moves all the time. If you can imagine a drive unit, there are six or seven key glue points in it.

We have glues that have more damping in them or can be set quickly in two minutes by shining a UV light on them.

What are the challenges involved in making and continuing to develop your own drive units?

There are a myriad of challenges – you need to understand how the drive unit will be manufactured. You can design what looks like a great drive unit on a screen, and make one of them, but making a thousand of them the same going on automated machines is a process – there are variances that occur. You need to make sure the design is fundamentally capable of handling that.

Does Monitor Audio see big differences in the ‘shape’ of global markets?

For example, traditionally America is considered the place where large loudspeakers are never large enough, whereas Europe is often considered more reserved and demands smaller designs. How do you address those differences?

It’s simple – we don’t design or develop products with different looks for different markets – we keep a consistent Monitor Audio feel to a product. But we develop a range of products and within that range there are models that maybe sell better in different areas.

What is the company’s direction of travel?

For example, is it looking at loudspeakers as an ‘active streaming music hub’, or are conventional loudspeakers still the way forward?

For the vast majority of people, there is definitely a pleasure they get from taking a record off the shelf, looking at the sleeve, holding the record in their hand, lifting the needle and dropping it on the turntable – the ritual.

We have to be careful – audio can become very sterile if you just walk into a room and play it on your phone.

Fulfilling the experience of what music can deliver to you means sitting down and involving yourself in the listening – that doesn’t necessarily always mean on your phone.

But do you have to cater for different consumers?

There’s a lot more streaming going in hi-fi electronics.

Vinyl doesn’t work for everyone – I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. If I stick a turntable in the living room, that won’t be a working turntable anymore. I have one in my office and my son is mesmerised by it rotating – he reaches for the needle…

What’s your take on the industry at the moment?

Innovation is key – I’m an engineer and I want to see people innovating and being a bit disruptive in the market. It’s always hard when you’ve got a business model where you know what works but you want to do something else – you don’t want to upset the market.

Especially in challenging times…

Exactly. There are lot of things we know about loudspeaker design.

From research that’s been done, we know that what we’re doing with Hyphn is the right way to go, but there are so many loudspeaker companies out there that aren’t looking at the latest research. There’s so much hi-fi out there, especially at the high-end, but which has no engineering background to justify its claims.

I think there’s a pressure in the industry to be different, but let’s see some difference that’s better. There are companies out there that are definitely doing it – we’re following them and we hope to drag more people with us.

In 2022, Monitor Audio celebrated its 50th anniversary. That’s a big birthday…

Fifty years is a milestone – the company has been through changes, but it’s always had that desire to deliver an experience.

Mo Iqbal [founder] originally got into Monitor Audio because he wanted to make loudspeakers better and we’re carrying on that tradition. We try to excite and engage people and deliver them an experience.

Manufacturer

Monitor Audio Ltd

www.monitoraudio.com

+44 (0)1268 740580

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