Krix LF-1 (1974/5)
As with many great hi-fi and technology companies, South Australia’s Krix began in a garage. Scott Krix spent his teenage years tinkering in the family garage in Loxton, SA, with kit amplifiers and experimental speakers, using scavenged parts from old radios. After completing his engineering degree in Adelaide, he established ‘Krix Speaker Systems’ in 1974, and began making speakers for his friends using a garage in a rented property in Hawthorn, SA.
His first commercially available design was the LF-1, which incorporated a Plessey Rola eight-inch bass unit and a two-inch cone tweeter. He photographed them in the garden in front of a blooming bush of bougainvillea.
“It wasn’t hard to fall into something I enjoyed doing,” Scott remembers. “With the state of the economy at the time there weren’t a lot of openings for graduate engineers, so considering I had a passion for building loudspeakers, and also with a background of a lot of Australian academia producing new ways of developing loudspeakers models — like Mr Thiele, who we all know about — that inspired me to give it a go, I suppose. I couldn’t see why an Australian manufacturer shouldn’t succeed against some of the other brand names like KEF and Celestion, etc. — why not have an Australian loudspeaker? I was prepared to give it a go. I really enjoyed doing it and I was pretty excited about getting my hands dirty and building something.”
Convinced they could make a class-leading electrostatic speaker capable of adequate bass and suitable for rock music, Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland (later naming their company ‘Martin Logan’, rather than ‘Sanders Sutherland’) conceived a prototype in 1980. Unfortunately, as the official history relates:
“It sounded even better than expected, but when they turned up the volume, a lightning storm erupted across the panel and music was replaced by a plume of smoke drifting toward the ceiling. Still, they knew they were close.”
Undeterred, the two budding speaker-makers’ next efforts resulted, three years later in time for that’s year’s CES exhibition, in their first production-ready speaker: the Monolith. It wowed all who heard and saw it at the show, its revised transducer using a clear Mylar diaphragm sandwiched between two perforated-steel stators. And, to ensure good sound dispersion, a horizontally curved panel was implemented; this curvilinear transducer has been central to the design of every Martin Logan electrostatic since.