We Build Loudspeakers to Reproduce Music. Not Specifications.

Altisonus is a small American loudspeaker company in Kansas, built around a simple idea: a loudspeaker should make reproduced music sound more like music.
That sounds obvious. It isn’t.

A loudspeaker can measure impressively and still fail to communicate the life, scale, texture and emotion of a performance. Numbers matter enormously; we use them every day. But measurements are tools, not the final objective. The final test is listening.

Nearly Fifty Years of Asking “Why?”

Altisonus grew from the audio work of designer Kermit V. Gray, who began designing and experimenting with sound reproduction in the 1970s. His background was not confined to loudspeakers. It included recording, live sound, broadcasting, electronics, acoustics, mastering and musical-instrument work. That proved important.

Working with microphones and live performers provides a rather unforgiving reference. You learn what voices and instruments actually sound like before they pass through an audio system. Then you begin noticing what reproduction loses. That question of “where did it go?” became a lifelong investigation into loudspeakers, electronics, rooms and human hearing.

KVG Laboratories, established in 1977, provided the experimental foundation from which Altisonus eventually developed.

Artistic Engineering

We sometimes describe our approach as artistic engineering. Engineering tells us whether something works. Art tells us whether it matters.

A loudspeaker is simultaneously an electrical network, a mechanical system, an acoustic radiator and an object placed in someone’s home. Ultimately, however, its purpose is neither producing graphs nor decorating a room. Its purpose is communicating music.

That means we pay attention to things sometimes overshadowed by fashionable specifications: resonances, breakup, radiation pattern, time behavior, stored energy, driver integration, room interaction and dynamic behavior. We are particularly interested in what happens between the measurements.

Designed Differently

Altisonus loudspeakers are not designed by assembling fashionable drivers, calculating a crossover and declaring victory. Development is iterative. We measure. We listen. We change something. We measure again. We listen again.
Prototypes may undergo dozens or even hundreds of changes before we consider a design finished. Sometimes an apparently promising idea is abandoned altogether. That isn’t inefficiency. That is engineering. We would rather discard a clever idea than sell a mediocre loudspeaker.

Altisonus

Made in Kansas by Kansans.