Out of the fjords...
Loudspeaker design is clearly encoded deeply in Danish bloodlines, and no company has risen higher in that gene pool than Jamo.
Jacobsen and Mortensen — Ja-Mo. Preben Jacobsen, a Danish joiner who was designing and producing loudspeaker cabinets in a hen-house on the shores of the Limfjord in Jutland, invited his brother-in-law, one Julius Mortensen, to turn his export sales experience in the fishing industry to the wonders of hi-fi sound. Founding the company in 1968 and two years later building their first factory in that same fishing village, Glyngøre in Denmark, their highly successful collaboration in loudspeakers was notable for its clear division of labour, with Jacobsen in charge of making the speakers and initially owner of the Jamo manufacturing organisation, and Mortensen using his marketing ability to build up an ever-expanding export business for his international marketing and distribution company AJM Agency. Initially the company produced speakers on an OEM basis for ITT, Dantax, Grundig, Goodmans and others, but it was soon decided to concentrate solely on the Jamo brand name.
It was the communication between the two that brought the company quick success — demand from Mortensen’s dealers and customers provided essential feedback from the market to drive Jacobsen’s production efforts, and this feedback loop was clearly a virtuous circle. The factory’s millionth loudspeaker was shipped in 1978, and by the end of the decade Jamo had a brand-new German subsidiary — and could describe itself as Scandinavia’s biggest producer of finished speakers.
Jamo’s 1980 company brochure (right) boasts of “91 500 square feet of loudspeakers” for its production facilities; there was in-house production of electronics components, its own silk-screen printing shop and PCB prototyping, and four assembly lines “in daily operation… There is capacity for 350 000 finished loudspeakers per annum, and it has been installed for easy expansion of capacity”.
In 1981 Jamo unveiled its new Centre Bass Reflex (CBR) speakers at IFA in Berlin, a suspension system reducing front-panel vibration and thereby coloration, and the success of CBR enabled Jamo to expand distribution to Japan. By 1985 annual production at Glyngøre was up to 600,000 finished systems at 2000 a day, with 85% of them being exported to customers in 20 countries (including those of Scan Audio in Australia, see panel). Preben Jacobsen continued to lead the product development, with facilities including an anechoic chamber and a special “reverberent
room” with non-parallel concrete surfaces (for measurements meeting international standards for total radiated sound power), and computer analysis too. But new designs were always “approved by a panel of qualified listeners” before going into production.
One design soon to emerge and find success in a faraway land was the Concert VII, which became winner of the very first Major Award for Loudspeakers in what were then called the CESA (Consumer Electronics Suppliers Association) Sound & Image awards, inaugurated in 1989 (see overleaf). The win was reported in the magazine, though without so much as a Judges’ Comment or a picture of the Concert VIIs…
Happily we can find rather more from 1990, when Ralphe Neill reviewed the Concert Vs for Australian Hi-Fi… “unusual in a number of respects, including the placement of the drivers”, he wrote, identifying the
rear-firing bass driver as “not an omnidirectional system”, rather “Jamo’s designers found that cabinet vibrations could be reduced by up to 20dB under test conditions in the range from 200Hz to 1kHz if two drivers were mounted back-to-back along with special cabinet bracing.”
By 1994 Jamo was Europe’s largest speaker manufacturer, an extraordinary achievement against such prolific and high quality competition, with its delightfully Danish designs continuing to impress the market. Witness the early use of curved cabinets in the Jamo 7-series in 1998 (later called the D5, with models D570 and D590).
The company had by now produced and sold more than 11.5 million units, and with the surround sound market in full swing, a loudspeaker company might have expected boom times.
Yet only three years later Preben Jacobsen and Julius Mortensen negotiated with Audio Holding to sell their shareholdings. It was a buyout with a future — Audio Holding’s main shareholder was FSN Capital, a Nordic company which planned to modernise the Glyngøre factory and increase capacity over the subsequent years.
But it didn’t go quite according to plan, as a 2003 Jamo planning document identified with the benefit of hindsight.
“The lucrative market for home cinema systems from 2000 and 2001 was hard-pressed by price-dumping from aggressive global big players with production in Korea and China,” it said. “Then came September 11, 2001, in combination with increased competition from large electronics groups and DVDs as the driver of loudspeaker sales.” As FSN Capital transferred its interest in the brand to Jyske Bank,
one change could no longer be avoided: “Analysis showed the following products could be advantageously produced in-house in Glyngøre: Volume Speakers and Subwoofers in Wood (i.e. products that largely match Jamo’s business concept until 1999). The rest could benefit from sources in China: all satellite speakers in plastic; less wood speakers (with relatively high labour costs in production in Denmark).”
This was a reality faced by many European manufacturers at the time, as today, and in 2004, Jamo began using production facilities in China for some products, under keen quality control observation. It also continued
its early expansion into electronics, with the successful multi-award-winning DVR 50 DVD receiver.
In 2005 Jamo was taken over by Klipsch Audio Technologies, today the Klipsch Group, part of VOXX International. Any thoughts that the brand might be relegated by its American owners into a badge for nondescript boxes was swiftly swept aside by the 2006 launch of the Reference R909, one of our Sound+Image Ultimate 30 (see p23). The R909 came from a Danish designer in chief acoustic engineer Henrik Mortensen, and it used Jamo’s Hard Conical Cones (see tech panel, left) in a Seas magnesium midrange driver, with a Scan-Speak tweeter and the dipolar open baffle design that made this speaker such a bold statement, especially as it was released in ‘supercar’ colours. The R909’s design not only looked stunning, it worked. Australian Hi-Fi’s Greg Borrowman encountered it first on the open show floor of CES 2006.
Attracted to Jamo’s stand by the exhibit of vibrantly-coloured Jamo R909s, which I’d never seen previously, I was taking the opportunity to examine them closely when Henrik Mortensen introduced himself as their designer. After a brief discussion about the various benefits of dipolar designs, and the difficulties of building open-baffle loudspeakers, Henrik suggested that the proof would be in the pudding, and would I care to have a listen. ‘They’re plugged in?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Sure!’ he replied and headed off to an amplifier hidden beneath one of the display stands. A few seconds later I was stunned to hear sound thundering out from the R909s at a volume level that would put a professional sound re-inforcement system to shame, and with such powerful low frequencies that for a moment I thought Mortensen must have hidden a separate bass bin somewhere on the