Sound with vision
All-in-one audio perfection — no bull
The world of high-fidelity audio isn’t known for its larger-than-life characters or maverick entrepreneurs. You’d struggle to name an Elon Musk of amplifiers or a Reed Hastings of record players. But there is one. Paul W Klipsch was an American engineer who designed radios for General Electric, worked on locomotives for the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Corporation railway, became a geophysicist for a Texan oil company and served as a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army. He was also an accomplished pilot, gun enthusiast, photographer, film-maker and cornet player. An inveterate tinkerer, visitors to Klipsch’s home in Hope, Arkansas recall sitting around the pool in his backyard being served cans of beer on a model steam train, of which he’d built every piston, cylinder and wheel.
He’d shown an interest in audio early on, designing a radio speaker out of headphones and a cardboard mailing tube in 1919, when he was 15. He returned to loudspeakers in 1946, founding the audio company Klipsch & Associates the same year — though he remained its sole employee for three years, building each speaker himself in his tin shed.
No sufferer of fools, he found early phonographs and speaker systems wanting — the company slogan “Bullshit” was born when he threw a hi-fi magazine across the room during a marketing meeting — and resolved to do better.
Work on his most famous speaker, the Klipschorn, took several years. Featuring a bass horn design that folded around itself and used the corner of a room for amplification, it was up to 20 times more efficient (ie, louder) than conventional speakers and has been in production for the last 75 years, the longest such run in audio.
Klipsch died in 2002 aged 98, though his legacy endures. This August, the Klipsch company releases an updated version of The Fives, its more versatile bookshelf speakers. The tech has come on since the tin shed days — these can connect to a 4K TV and have been billed “a soundbar killer” — though some of the 1940s design cues remain in their real wood veneer and metal accents.
The company philosophy endures, too. Visitors to the Klipsch stand at trade fairs today are still presented with yellow lapel badges emblazoned with Paul W’s succinct view of the competition: “Bullshit”.
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