Krix Loudspeakers
an austraLian story
As with so many great hi-fi and technology companies, it all began in a garage. Scott Krix spent his teenage years tinkering in the family garage with kit amplifiers and experimental speakers using scavenged parts from old radios. In that garage in Hawthorn, Adelaide, he established ‘Krix Speaker Systems’ in 1974, and began making speakers for his friends. His first commercially available design was the LF-1, which incorporated a Plessey Rola two-inch bass unit and a two-inch cone tweeter.
“I had a passion for building loudspeakers, and with a lot of Australian academia like Mr Thiele producing new ways of developing loudspeakers, that inspired me to give it a go. I couldn’t see why an Australian manufacturer couldn’t succeed against some of the other brand names like KEF and Celestion, etc. — why not have an Australian loudspeaker? And I was prepared to give it a go.”
In 1976 Scott opened his own retail shop, The Acoustic Foundry, in Goodwood,
Adelaide, demonstrating his own designs against those from overseas — back in the days of the Aussie cultural cringe, many assumed that foreign designs were innately superior. By direct comparison, Scott could disprove this fallacy and show the merits of his designs, moving from kits (kit speakers had significant tax advantages in those days) to a new fully assembled product line, the HG series (Home Grown).”
There was also a sideline in semi-pro systems.
“Night clubs were all the rage at the time,” says Scott. “We made some pretty ‘out-there’ speaker systems for that market.”
1980s – Into the Cinema
As Krix the company entered the 1980s, Scott Krix was approached by a local commercial cinema in Goodwood, S.A.
“We were approached to provide loudspeakers for a local cinema,” remembers Scott, “and we encountered an acoustic problem when we performed the EQ. We came up with a solution, which happened to be the world’s first infinite baffle used in cinema.”
Word spread throughout the local industry of this infinite baffle solution and the improvements it could provide.
“We were approached by the major installer in Australia to do a few large auditoriums as part of their upgrade program, and we refined the technology. From there we did about 90% of the Cinema Multiplex expansion for all the major players that occurred from the mid 1980s and into the 90s.”
Success and surround
Krix was already receiving praise for its domestic loudspeaker designs, its reputation enhanced by the highly popular Esoterix 2 and an early Sound+Image award for the SuperBrix bookshelf speaker. So with this and its cinema expertise, the company was ideally placed when 5.1-channel surround sound became the must-have home audio innovation from the 1990s onwards.
The Equinox, Lyrix and new Esoterix models all won awards for the company, and laid a basis for exhibiting at CES in Las Vegas, which brought international distribution deals for first Hong Kong, then Malaysia, and then, in 1996, in the United States. After celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1999, and later
exhibiting at the Cinema Expo convention in Amsterdam, distribution was established in Ireland, Italy, and Germany, with subsequent cinema installations projects undertaken as far afield as Austria, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, even Afghanistan. With new distribution deals for Scandinavia, Taiwan, and new wider US distribution, Krix became an undeniably international brand.
Back in Australia the run of awardwinning consumer speakers continued, while the company also created an entirely new range of concealed audio products for multiroom and home theatre installations, which continues today in a concealed and architectural range.
Krix today
Today Scott’s original dream is reality. The Krix team manufactures high quality loudspeakers for home and commercial use — there are some 3000 commercial cinema installations globally using Krix speakers in 30 countries worldwide. The company manufactures at its South Australia base, and also overseas for the cost advantage, though as Scott says, “all the intellectual property, all the engineering, all the quality control starts and ends here in Australia.”
Three recent releases highlight Krix’s continued innovation. Its cinema expertise was leveraged to deliver the Series MX, a modular custom installation solution which has been inevitably dubbed the Krix Wall of Sound (recognised in our Ultimate 30 this issue, see p32). Meanwhile the resurgence of stereo has seen the company develop two entirely new stereo designs.
The standmount Esoterix (pictured previous page) are aimed at customers “looking for an outstanding pair of compact speakers for purely stereo applications”. The Esoterix name was last used some 15 years ago for the company’s then flagship floorstander model. But “we decided to start with a standmount speaker using very high quality components and a unique cabinet design,” says Krix’s Don MacKenzie. “This
compact speaker sounds bigger than it looks and will satisfy many music lovers regardless of room size or décor.”
There there’s Scott Krix’s bold Heretix design (above), a speaker he “has long wanted to develop”, says MacKenzie. “His idea was to produce a speaker that took advantage of the extensive research program that the company undertook to develop and then patent its horn technology. Scott’s aim was to produce a speaker capable of 100dB of dynamic range, and that meant using a separate digital processor with active crossovers and independent amplifiers for each speaker driver.”
Still aiming high, and delivering in both consumer and commercial arenas, Krix shows no sign of slowing up as it heads towards its next landmark of 50 years.