Company Profile
A perfect ten As part of its 10th anniversary, Austrian manufacturer LEWITT is soon to introduce what it describes as a truly unique, ‘revolutionary’ flagship microphone. Colby Ramsey recently took a trip to the company’s headquarters in the heart of Vienna, Austria, to get an exclusive first listen of the new model, which has been a decade in the making...
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en years is not a very long time when talking about the lifespan of a business, yet it’s a long enough period of time in which extensive change can and may occur. This has certainly been the case at LEWITT, which is gearing up to celebrate its 10th anniversary next year with the launch of a new flagship microphone. But while the microphone won’t be unveiled until 2020, LEWITT recently carried out a very focussed R&D process with the LEWITT Sound Survey, inviting everyone with a passion for sound to play a crucial role in its development using an online tool. Here, end users – who were entered into a draw to win one of the flagship microphones – were asked if they could hear the difference between various sound characters and which they prefer, allowing audio enthusiasts at every level to get involved in the “creation of a new microphone classic.” At the end of September, AMI was very kindly invited to LEWITT’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and was given the chance to speak to its team of audio specialists, including CEO and founder Roman Perschon. The prototype of the new flagship microphone offering had been completed just one week before our visit. “That was our challenge from the beginning,” says Perschon of the Sound Survey. “To find out what sound people are looking for. We wanted to really interact with our closest network here in Vienna – recording engineers and studios – as it can be quite difficult to nail down exactly what users are looking for in a sound.” One really important thing is that LEWITT does all the electronics and microphone designs itself, so if something needs to be changed then it can be done without delay. With the company’s 040 MATCH model for example, and as explained by head of product and marketing Moritz Lochner, “the measurement is essentially built into the microphone, allowing for quicker adjustment and automated measurement with audio precision software, which in turn allows for quicker production and therefore cheaper costs.” Keen to find out more about what makes him tick, I sat down for some traditional Chinese tea with Roman Perschon – the company’s founder and CEO – in his office. “I always had a passion for music and audio gear,” he tells me. “As a teenager I started out building my own speakers which are the ones you see over here [in my office]. It was a fun project and they sound horrible compared to today’s standards, but back then they were loud and did the job!”
Hungry to learn, Perschon decided to go and study electronics. He then worked at AKG, which he says was an interesting time for him: “At one point I thought to myself, there can be more interesting, more innovative, better-sounding microphones, and shortly after this I had the opportunity to found LEWITT,” he says. “In the early days it was difficult of course. We were only a handful of dedicated, very skilled people – a group of people who I was very lucky to find actually.”
ABOVE: LEWITT founder and CEO Roman Perschon
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