Masterful Simplicity: Inside Kudos Audio Loudspeaker Design

Late last year, we shared a short biography of Derek Gilligan’s career in loudspeaker design. It offered an engaging glimpse at his history in sound reproduction and HiFi – yet along the way, we found ourselves wanting to dig deeper into one particular choice topic. Namely, Derek’s relatively uncommon approach to loudspeaker design. 

Kudos Audio loudspeakers have been lauded by some of the most respected reviewers and publications in premium audio, whilst gracing the homes and listening rooms of music lovers around the world. Yet, in a world of infinitesimally fine margins, Derek implicitly trusts his ears and his instinct over any kind of traditionally conventional loudspeaker measurements. He’s forged a career out of this approach – eschewing spectrum analyses and raw mathematics, instead taking an empirical, almost holistic approach to loudspeaker design. Forged upon foundations strong from decades of experience in sound production, Derek has designed and built every loudspeaker in Kudos Audio’s history using this process.

We wanted to know more. Where did this masterfully simple methodology begin? And how is it demonstrated through the current Kudos Audio products? The answers, at times, amazed us – and revealed an almost exclusively music-led design approach that stands Kudos loudspeakers apart as almost wholly unique within premium HiFi. 

THE FOUNDATIONS

As we revealed in last year’s piece, Derek’s career in music reproduction began in live sound. Derek regularly supported his sound engineer brother on shows, and together, they created their own relatively novel method for mixing live bands. 

“We didn’t use spectrum analysers to set PA’s up,” Derek tells us, “which is of course the starting point for pretty much every professional live sound engineer”. For the uninitiated, the traditional building blocks of live sound engineering involve ‘getting the room flat’, a process by which audio analysers are used to address problem frequencies and awkward transients in the performance space. The aim is to tweak the PA’s EQ to a point where the sound system and the acoustics of the room sit in harmony with one another – therefore allowing the sound of the band to flourish to its full potential. 

To reiterate, almost every sound engineer will use some form of audio spectrum analyser to perform this task. “We just never did that, because we found that the end result was achieved quicker, easier, and much better when we just listened to it”, Derek reveals. “The more you work with live bands, the more you start to understand what makes a difference to the sound performance, and how the crowd reacts to said differences…it can change with these relatively subtle tweaks in the sound.” 

Whilst Derek’s brother, Trevor, sat at the Front Of House mixing desk, Derek’s job would be to ‘walk the room’ and provide crucial information on what needed to change for each area of the concert hall. “We had a few recorded tracks we used to assess the PA once we’d set up, I remember one of them was Rudy by Supertramp,” Derek recalls. “Once we’d set up, tested out the PA, and sound checked the band, it would all completely change again once you got an audience in…it gave me a real appreciation of how little has to change environmentally to dramatically affect what you hear.”

As the show was ongoing, Derek would continue to ‘walk the room’, gauging the reaction of the audience to understand whether the sound was performing as effectively as it could. It’s hard to understate how unique a skill set this could cultivate. The ability to listen, assess and define the characteristics of the soundstage, and then understand how to instantly fix any inadequacies in said soundstage, is a fairly big task for even the most discerning music enthusiast. It’s almost the audio equivalent of professional wine tasting. Through his early years in live sound, Derek found the perfect place to refine his palate. 

“How we mixed those rooms still makes up the basis of how I design now,” Derek reveals. “I wait until I have a relatively concrete idea in my mind, then I get a prototype made, and listen to it. There are key sonic elements that I’m looking for the prototype to achieve, and if it hits those elements, I know I’m onto something. If it misses, then we scrap and start again. Although over the years I’ve had very few scrapped projects.”

SYNAESTHESIA – BUILDING SOUND THROUGH COLOUR

Derek’s undeniably holistic approach to music and speaker design has deeper foundations than you might initially think. Another quite unexpected, subconscious influence on the way Derek experiences music comes from his Synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is a condition experienced by a small percentage of the general population – a perceptual phenomenon where an individual experiences one sense through another. For Derek, that means he can experience sound as a sense of shapes and colours. Here, we ask Derek to explain how it works, and how it feels;

“In its simplest terms, Synaesthesia is a condition that arises from the neural pathways not forming correctly, or forming differently, in early child development. If the “normal” pathway for hearing cannot be formed for whatever reason, the marvel of the human brain finds another way. If the alternative route happens to pass closely to the neural pathway for sight, there can be some cross over between the two. The result of which can be for the individual to be able to “see sound” as a range of colours, at the same time as hearing in real time.”

It’s without a doubt that Derek’s Synaesthesia will have altered the way he experiences music, but has it had an influence on how he builds loudspeakers?

“Hmmm, difficult question to answer but in short yes. The reason I say difficult is because I grew up with this and never really gave it a second thought, so it’s not something I actively “turn on” or think about when listening to things.” 

“However I think it has just given me over the years another understanding about sound and how it forms in the air, and because I have never studied or have qualifications in mathematics on the subject I have also come to realise over the years that this means I have no pre-conceived bounds to what I think, hear, or see. I think this has been the biggest creative tool I’ve utilised to date.”

THE PROCESS TAKES SHAPE

It wasn’t long before Derek started experimenting with loudspeaker design. His first projects were helping to build speakers for his brother’s PA systems – utilising a wealth of family skills, including his father’s joinery business for the cabinet builds. “We were often just experimenting for experiment’s sake’, Derek tells us. At times, this experimental process took a few surprising turns.

“When I first started designing speakers, I was honestly just coming up with my own processes as I went along…I remember in the really early days, working on one design, I couldn’t work out how to calculate the volume of a speaker cabinet…so rather than work out the maths of it, I sealed it up with plasticine, got a litre empty bottle of Coke, and filled the cabinet up with water until it was full!”. 

It wasn’t long, though, until Derek’s design processes began to refine into something that more closely resembles what it is today. Derek’s early years in speaker design were spent at Neat, where he worked on the now iconic Neat Petite, among many other award-winning speakers. His idea of masterful simplicity was now starting to find form in real life designs. 

“The idea that simplicity is the best approach was starting to evolve…although I probably didn’t know it consciously at the time. It didn’t take long to realise that simple ideas, executed well, just always superseded the complicated’. 

CREATING KUDOS AUDIO SPEAKERS

“I only knew how to do one thing.”

That’s how Derek describes his leap into loudspeaker design under the brand name “Kudos Audio”. That name was originally attributed to a range of speaker stands, but in the mid-2000s, Derek reappropriated it to become the name for his new loudspeaker manufacturing company. Now, running a company for the first time, Derek could let his own ideas lead him down new and exciting paths. With a carefully honed ability as a loudspeaker designer, Derek was now able to lean on this well established skillset, whilst simultaneously taking some calculated creative risks. 

“There were lots of things I wanted to experiment with, to try out for myself.” Derek explains. “Establishing Kudos gave me the opportunity to get properly creative.”

“For starters, I wanted to be able to implement the drivers of my choice” For Derek, this meant only one company. “I contacted Olav Mellum Arntzen and Grethe Årum at SEAS and they were immediately supportive of what I was trying to do…our company philosophies have a lot of similarities, I think. They don’t jump on the latest technological bandwagons. They rely on tried, tested, perfected methods. And their quality is second to none.”

SEAS were only too happy to work with Derek to customise in-house drivers so that they could be tailor-made to fit Kudos Audio’s emerging loudspeaker designs. This relationship would prove pivotal in the ongoing success of Kudos loudspeakers to this day.

“Another absolutely crucial relationship in the early days was with the team at NAIM”, Derek tells us. An opportunity to take part in NAIM Audio’s now-iconic HiFi shows in West London lent Kudos Audio an important level of legitimacy within the industry. “At these shows, NAIM would put on three rooms, one would be a big NAIM system, one would be smaller. The third room would then be provided by Tom Tom Audio, and was a bit more left afield.” The Tom Tom Audio team would facilitate a NAIM system with elements of non-NAIM products, to demonstrate its versatility. “Doug Graham included us in this room for multiple years back to back…that was a huge leg up.”

“That affiliation meant people knew they could take us seriously.”

And what about Kudos Audio speaker design? We ask Derek to tell us about how his process evolved from this point, through the focus of the Titan range. “The T88 came first…essentially that was the prototype of the 808. The T88 was me wanting to try out a lot of ideas; however the implementation of those ideas was still a bit limited by the price point.” 

The T88 became the testing ground for a lot of the technologies made famous in the Titan series – technologies like the isobaric design with reversed internal bass unit, better decoupling on the baffles, and the separate cabinets with the boundary port in between. From the moment Derek assembled the first prototype, he knew he was onto something;

“I put it all together, put it on, and sat there and thought ‘there’s nothing to change’. I might have turned the tweeter down a fraction, and then it was done.”

Once the T88 was released, Derek turned his attention to what might come next. By ignoring budget constraints, he could let his creativity be the sole driver of the design. What followed was the Titan 808.

BUILDING A TITAN

The Titan series saw Derek’s design process fully formed. What did that look like?

“I have an idea, a picture of what the loudspeaker will look and sound like in my mind. There’s a goal, but it’s fairly open ended at first. At the beginning, I never know how far past my expectations a design will go. I always have a minimum expectation, and certainly with the Titans I would find the end product would surpass that. I effectively just keep experimenting with the design, trial and error, until I get where I want it to be.”

“I’ve always got to improve on what I’ve done before. That’s the driving force. Until then it’s not done.” 

Are there technical considerations to take into account when designing Titan loudspeakers? “It’s difficult to put a technical goal on something when you’re not thinking about it from a technical point of view. For me there’s a musical goal, and the technical processes are a means to get me to that musical end.” 

The technical processes are reserved for when challenges arise in the design development. “If I need to figure out a solution to a problem, then it starts getting techy.” Derek tells us. “If I don’t have any issues, then the technical stuff has already happened along the way.”

This could potentially make the Kudos Audio design process sound easy. Straightforward. A walk in the park. It is anything but. This is a unique skillset, honed over decades of experience in an industry defined by deep nuance. It takes masterful understanding of the design and build process, and a total, unequivocal trust in your audible judgement. Music, ultimately, is what builds these speakers.

“Listening to music is 85 to 90% of the process. I’ll have an idea, consider what needs to be done physically to bring that idea to life, and put together a prototype based on those assumptions. Then I’ll listen, listen, listen.”

“I don’t think about the frequency response at all when listening to prototypes. The questions I ask myself are; Does it sound right? Does it make music? Does it make me smile?”

PLEASING THE WHOLE ROOM

“I like to think the way I design speakers is similar to engineering live sound for an audience. My job is to please the whole room. Some people might think that means making sacrifices in order to make everyone happy…but for me, appealing to the widest audience is the most difficult thing for a designer to achieve. I can quite easily make a speaker that will please me and me alone, but maybe not anyone else. I don’t see it as Kudos Audio’s job to please me and my listening tastes. It’s about pleasing the whole room”

The release of the 808 was a major success for Kudos Audio – bringing the pinnacle of Kudos listening to more music lovers than ever before. The next step was to introduce as much of that Titan magic as possible into a wider product range.

“Essentially the whole Titan range is designed to get as much of that 808-ness into a smaller package as is practically and physically possible.” Derek reveals. “Even the 505 is still designed to have that 808 quality.”

With the 707, 606, and 505, the task became understanding what could be removed from their design, without losing the magic of the 808s. Derek explains it like this; “You’ve always got to lose something, but you’ve got to ensure you don’t lose the crucial bits. So a 505 still has to have the sonic character of an 808, just in a bookshelf design”. 

Did this process prove a challenge for Derek? “The 606 was the biggest challenge of the grouping. Squeezing full bandwidth, character and performance into a unit that small took a lot of time and careful consideration, but it was worth it in the end. It’s become our most popular model in the range.”

“The 505 was loads of fun to design…it put a huge smile on my face from the moment we tried out the prototype. When we launched it I thought it would have a limited market due to its price point for a bookshelf, but I think people see it more as an entry level Titan than a standmount. It’s got its own little fan club now.”

THE FUTURE OF KUDOS AUDIO

Derek’s uncommon pursuit of masterful simplicity shows no signs of slowing down. The release of SIGAO DRIVE last year is potentially the most quintessential embodiment of his design philosophy to date. By removing the power supply from a traditional active crossover, Derek found a simpler and arguably better solution to active listening – but that simplicity required a huge amount of intricate design to get it over the line. 

Now that SIGAO DRIVE is launched, where can we expect Derek to turn his attention next? Unsurprisingly, he’s careful in his response – but not without a glint in his eye as he teases us about what is to come. 

“I have a loudspeaker design in my mind that I’m fairly sure has never been done before. I’m 99% certain it can be done, I just need to get my head around how to make it happen. That’s my next job!”