Dick Shahinian
This brief interview took place back in June 1994 and shines a little light on why Shahinian loudspeakers are so radically different from most.
In an afternoon’s conversation with New York-born, Dick Shahinian discussing topics as diverse as real ale and Turner – whom he describes in his likeable, flamboyant manner as one of the “cosmic greats” in art – as well as music, of which he has a truly encyclopaedic knowledge, I gained a better appreciation of why his loudspeakers flout convention. What follows barely penetrates the surface of the erudite, entertaining discourse he provided.
“Fifty years ago, when I was fourteen, I went to my first concert at Carnegie Hall from which I came away thinking ‘records are a joke, trying to duplicate that dynamic range and tone at home.’ That was what started me in audio – the idea that somehow it could be done. Since then my reaction to convention has been that being one of the pack is truly boring. I think that going back and looking at what’s been ignored is more interesting than going forward like some blind fool, hurtling ahead to find that what’s there isn’t really that interesting or different.
“Ninety-nine per cent of loudspeakers copy each other, either looking or sounding alike. I’m taking another direction following people like Otto Enckel, A. Stewart Hegeman, Murray Crosby and Buckminster Fuller. I’m not trying to challenge the rest of the audio community other than to say that I’m impatient with its idea that what I’m doing is off-centre. I’m ready to start taking on its attitude towards non-directional or omni-directional sound and address the fact that all sound in the universe is radial and not directional.
“What I’m doing is not trail-blazing or innovative because much of my work is based on things that you’ll find in Harry F. Olson’s treatise in 1939, following simple ideas such as the geometry published in Van Nostrand’s Elements of Acoustic Engineering. This said that the worst possible shape for a loudspeaker is a square cube with the driver mounted in the centre of one face, and that the second worst is a rectangular box, which is exactly what most modern loudspeakers are. The top form of the Shahinian Obelisk – by accident because I didn’t see Olson’s book until after I’d designed it – is the second most nearly correct shape for a loudspeaker: the best is a sphere while the second is a pyramid with a rectangular base.
“Nobody seems to consider that the waveforms of music and sound are radial. They radiate in all directions so why make a loudspeaker box where the drivers sit on one face pointing towards you? If you stand someone speaking in the middle of a room and have them rotate through 360 degrees they have a sound that you can specifically hear as being on-axis and off-axis. Put that voice through a conventional loudspeaker and rotate it, and once you get about ten or fifteen degrees off-axis, notwithstanding all the nonsense published about dispersion (laughs), the voice takes on a very different character because of diffraction and collected axial effects. Do that with our loudspeakers and it sounds more like a person rotating. This sounds primitive but it demonstrates that what’s really required is that a loudspeaker be a point source with polydirectional activity.
“Using such speakers you can enjoy a recreation of a three-dimensional, natural effect of listening to music instead of the synthetic activity of listening to two sources. I read a wonderful line in a magazine about ten years ago: Larry Klein, then the technical editor of Stereo Review, said something like ‘I don’t like the idea of stereo because there isn’t any music that starts out as two sources.’ The spirit of what I’m doing is to go back to the professional symbol used for stereo – a pair of overlapped circles. I don’t recognise left and right. For me it’s left all the way to right, front all the way to back. I’ve never yet seen a conductor conducting an orchestra where the middle of the stage was empty yet I think most loudspeakers sound like that. This preoccupation with a phantom image in between the loudspeakers, which everybody gets so thrilled about, can easily be achieved by the worst loudspeakers in the world simply by switching to mono; so what’s the big excitement about? To sit and listen to left and right was finished at the very beginning of stereo. It was page one of the book and we should have turned over by now.
Listen to Shahinian with a closed mind and preconceptions founded on conventional thinking and you might indeed consider him ‘off-centre.’ However, he has ways of confronting cynicism: “I did a series of psychoacoustical experiments every weekend for eleven weeks using two pairs of identical Obelisk loudspeakers, one of which was concealed by acoustically transparent screens. Every listener greatly preferred what they were sure were the ‘larger’ speakers behind the screens. That alone illustrates that we still have much to learn about listening to music and loudspeakers.”
