IN PROFILE
MARTIN AUDIO As Martin Audio celebrates half a century of business, TPi sits down with Managing Director, Dom Harter, who explains why the original principles of Founder, Dave Martin are still ever-present.
Words: Stew Hume Photos: Martin Audio
“The first time I came across Martin Audio was back in 1996 while studying at Keele University,” reminisced Martin Audio Managing Director, Dom Harter. Our conversation took place a month after the firm welcomed friends and employees to celebrate its 50th anniversary. During the celebration, guests were given a hardback book, which contains a detailed timeline of the company and celebrates its highlights through the years. The first page details David Martin’s founding principles of the company, which still ring true today – namely that the audience experience is the top priority. With the overarching goal of making speakers that allow the ‘whole’ audience to enjoy a live show, David went on to become a pioneer of professional and touring sound
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as we know it. “The focus on the audience experience is key in everything we do at Martin,” explained Harter. “When you look at any of our arrays and all the technology that has gone into them for the past five decades, it has always been about making them sound amazing, no matter where you are in a crowd. You will sometimes hear companies talk about how the sound comes out of their loudspeakers which, frankly, is totally irrelevant. What matters is what you hear from where you’re stood – always,” he stated. Having been at the helm since 2016, Harter provided an overview of some of the changes he has seen at the company. “Around 2016, although Martin Audio was still making fantastic products, we’d lost our way slightly. The then ownership by LOUD Group wasn’t
quite the right fit and there was a need for a change.” In the proceeding years, Martin Audio was taken out of the LOUD portfolio to be bought by new owners, Focusrite, in 2019. Away from the corporate ownership, Harter explained the new direction the company began to take from then onwards. “We’ve had a flurry of products,” he chuckled, explaining how he felt as if he’d been to 100 production launches since taking on the role of MD. “The idea of all of these additions to the Martin Audio range was not about breaking into new markets, but giving customers from multiple sectors the time and attention they deserved,” he commented. He explained how there had been a pattern over the years of only really focussing on one market for a period of a few years, before moving on to another. “One of my goals was to give each sector a new toy,” he put simply. In its current state, you can find the Martin Audio logo on a whole range of boxes, from the install ranges of Adorn, CDD-WR and Ceiling Series all the way to its flagship MLA System, but according to Harter, no matter the size, there is a commonality between each range. “There are limits with what you can do with products and it’s not simple to implement optimisation software from a £1m PA setup in a £100 speaker. That said, you could learn a lot in the development of speakers on either end of the spectrum, which is why here at Martin Audio we do not have a dedicated R&D team for the install and live products. We just have the R&D team,” he commented. The people working on the latest install offering also turn their hands to massive PA systems – an advantage according to the MD, as any benefit of learning you get from a project can be transferred into another. “As the same team is creating all of the products, the voice of all the systems are very similar, so you know what you’re going to get when you have a Martin product,” Harter said. Moving the conversation onto the present, Harter explained how he and the team had fared during the pandemic and shared some