INSIDE STORY: SENNHEISER

Uwe Cremering (below) is Director of AMBEO Immersive Audio at Sennheiser, overseeing not only the soundbar but VR, AR, sports broadcasting and more. We asked him to explain AMBEO’s genesis...

SOUND+IMAGE: So a lot of soundbars go with a subwoofer and smaller soundbar — how early was that solution rejected for the AMBEO project?

UWE CREMERING: I would say two years before launch. We said, OK, if we do something, then we should aim that we can put everything in one box. We saw some other systems in the market with back speakers and subwoofer, but this was actually something which came from the Neumann guys, they said Uwe trust us, we will find a solution where we do not need a subwoofer, because we can go down to 30Hz with the soundbar, which is quite deep. Of course, if you have a subwoofer at home, you can connect it — but it’s not needed. And this was an early beginning where we said, OK, we have to differentiate this from the market, so we have to make sure that we do not need anything else.

S+I: And Sennheiser has not traditionally been a speaker company, but you have Neumann, and we gather Neumann was involved in the drivers — how much general interaction was there between Sennheiser and Neumann on this?

UC: Yes, very strong. You’re right, this is the first time we’ve developed home audio speakers. And from a strategic perspective we said, OK, do we want to go into this market? Because there are some players in the market, it’s new for us, we have to make sure how do we learn, how do we scale up and so on. But we decided we want to do it. And along with this decision, we are a family-driven company, and whatever we do, we have to come from a top-level approach. So we have Professor Sennheiser [above, on screen], and I can’t say, ‘Professor, we’ll go with a €200 soundbar’. There is always a commitment. And he said, ‘OK, make sure that we are the best’.

S+I: Nice thing to hear.

UC: Yes but that’s his approach, he wants to be proud of it. He says ‘Uwe, you will write my name on the product, so make sure that we are the best in that! And then later on you can come with some daughters and sons, but make sure that we start from that top gear approach’.

And then of course, we made a kind of team and we invited the Neumann guys, because what we have in Sennheiser — and I’m proud that we have this — we have sound engineers on the one side who come from a science perspective, but we have also tone-meisters, yes? Tone-meisters really come with their ears, and sometimes they don’t know what to do and how to do it, and I would say sometimes it’s voodoo! But sometimes they do something and it sounds different.

S+I: Great word, tone-meister.

UC: Yes we have three or four of them. And indeed, we use the experience we’ve had with the studio market, how to do this. And we brought them together.

S+I: And some of those are Neumann guys?

UC: Some of the Neumann guys, yes, from the studio experience, we brought them in. Markus Wollf was one of the guys we used from the Neumann team — not for the entire time, but he was on board for eight weeks. And he did a lot of, I don’t know, the voodoo stuff! So we gave him the soundbar when when we we had it 70% ready, and then closed the office — he was working on that with two colleagues and they did some measurements, and they adjusted the drivers. And the difference — and I’m not the one with the golden ears, but the difference was really audible also for me, and I was surprised about that.

S+I: Gives you hope.

UC: And there was something else Professor Sennheiser said — if we do the soundbar, in the current market you see two options of soundbar. The one type has artificial 3D, they go down with the bass, you feel it in your stomach, and you hear artificial 3D but the sound is not good.

S+I: Indeed. And they’re never musical.

UC: Exactly. Or you have speaker systems which are good from an audiophile perspective. And he said ‘Make sure that we have both, find the balance that we have both.’ So that’s the reason that the soundbar is bulky, of course. S+I: Well yes, and that’s my last question. So big!

UC: You know, we need volume. We invested a lot of money in drivers and amplifiers in the soundbar, and that’s also the reason why the soundbar is high priced. What’s in this soundbar is state-of the art technology, because we are an audiophile company, and people who have listened to, I don’t know, the HD 800, they have expectations towards the soundbar.