Follow That Dream – Even If It’s A Submersible Car
This week’s Sunday Thoughts is being written while I’m lying on the bed at the Sobieski Hotel in downtown…or is it uptown? I’m never entirely sure what American folk mean by those terms… Warsaw, where we are staying while covering the excellent Audio Video Show. It’s a brilliant event and, obviously, we’ll be bringing you all the latest news, product launches and assorted HiFi whatnot from the show. However, that’s not what this week’s Sunday Thoughts is about, although the theme for the article was sparked by something that happened on Thursday evening, before the show opened on Friday.
We’d been invited along to see the latest offering from Silent Pound, a brand we’ve been fans of and have followed around since its launch at this very event a few years ago. Since then, Silent Pound has grown into a well-respected brand with a couple of excellent products under its belt and a third being launched at the Warsaw show itself. That new loudspeaker is called the Parallax, a passive 3.5-way design built around the idea of controlled directivity across its operating range, including the bass. You can read more about the Silent Pound Parallax here if you want the full technical details, but, in a nutshell, it’s a mahoosive loudspeaker with four – yes, four – 15-inch bass drivers per speaker, along with four midrange drivers arranged around a centrally positioned horn-loaded compression driver.
There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but the technical ins and outs of the Parallax aren’t really the subject of this article.
I got talking to Audrius, Silent Pound’s head honcho and the designer of the loudspeaker, about how the company and the Parallax had come about. Basically, he said that this was his “dream speaker”. We’d previously asked Audrius for a quote about his journey, and this is what he came back with:
“In 2019, I wanted a really good audio system for my own home. I knew very little about the HiFi industry, so I went to High End Munich to hear the different options for myself. I found a few systems I really liked, but the prices shocked me.
“I’d been working with electronics since I was a kid. At 13, I built my first medium-wave radio receiver from scratch, soldering it together myself. With that background, I thought building my own speakers would be an interesting DIY project.
“While researching different speaker designs and trying out ideas, I came up with some fundamentally different solutions. The results sounded great to my ears, and I felt I had developed something really distinctive. That encouraged me to take it further and start Silent Pound.
“I got hooked, and it’s been a bit of an obsession ever since.”
There’s quite a journey contained in those few paragraphs. He went to Munich because he wanted a really good music system for his own home, decided that the systems he liked were more expensive than he was prepared to pay, and thought he might have a go at building his own loudspeakers instead.
Most of us would have come home, complained about the prices for a few weeks and eventually bought something cheaper. Audrius started a loudspeaker company. That’s following your dream with a degree of commitment that rather puts filling in an online vision board to shame.
Charles, the head fella and designer at Kharma, told me at the Warsaw National Stadium show that one of his dreams had been to build the biggest loudspeaker in the world, something he achieved with the enormous Enigma Reference, potentially the first line-array design. He also dreamed of building the best loudspeaker in the world and certainly believes he’s managed that, too. His final ambition was for Kharma to become the world’s biggest loudspeaker brand and, with the important caveat that we’re talking about the ultra-high-end market here, he reckons he’s achieved that as well. Having ticked those fairly modest little aspirations off his list, he’s now happy to concentrate on inventing things and getting on with whatever idea comes next.
Igor Akrapovič is already a hugely successful figure in the automotive world, but his dream came from wanting more music and less of what he perceived as a “HiFi sound” at home. He wanted to be able to sit down, forget about the equipment entirely and hear nothing but his beloved music. The physical results of that dream were on display at the Warsaw show, demonstrating once again that success in one field doesn’t necessarily stop you from dreaming about what you might create in another. You’ll be able to read more about his UBIQAUDIO project in our coverage of the Warsaw event next week.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a dentist. I wasn’t particularly interested in teeth, oral hygiene or inflicting untold amounts of pain on unsuspecting victims, but my dentist had bought himself a white Lotus like the one that turned into a submarine in the James Bond film of the era. I thought that car was the bee’s knees, ankles, and feet-fingers, all combined into one, and I wanted one. My young mind worked out that the way to get one was to have a good job, and being a dentist appeared to be a route to untold wealth and amphibious sports-car ownership.
It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated career plan. I don’t recall considering the required qualifications, the years of training or whether I had any aptitude whatsoever for poking around in strangers’ mouths. I simply saw a Lotus, saw that my dentist owned it and concluded that dentistry must be the path to automotive nirvana.
I never became a dentist and, as it happens, I don’t particularly like going to them. I also never got the Lotus, though that was probably for the best. Owning an old British sports car is one thing; expecting it to remain watertight while travelling underwater feels like the sort of confidence even the most committed optimist might struggle to maintain…and I like to think of myself as an optimist and a dreamer.
After abandoning dentistry, I decided I wanted to fly fast jets. Despite being a fully paid-up member of CND, I wanted to join the RAF purely so I could get my hands on something very fast, very noisy and capable of travelling upside down. Sadly, a few things got in the way of fulfilling that particular dream. My eyesight wasn’t brilliant, for one thing, and I suspect the greater obstacle was my particularly strong – but, I think, healthy – disrespect for authority in all its bossy forms. Questioning every instruction and asking whether we might first discuss the wider ethical and practical implications probably isn’t what the armed forces are looking for in a fighter pilot. I imagine that “because I said so” features rather heavily in military training, whereas my instinctive response has always been, “Yes, but why?”
And so another of my teenage dreams was dashed before I’d even had the chance to eject from anything expensive.
I could go on and on about the different dreams I’ve had over the years, but the point is that I’ve always had them and, to a greater or lesser extent, I’ve usually tried to follow them. Some have come to fruition, some have developed into minor night-terror situations, and others have been forgotten almost as soon as they popped into my head. That doesn’t mean they were pointless. Dreams can give you direction even when you don’t end up at the destination you originally had in mind. You might set off determined to become a dentist, a fighter pilot or the owner of a Lotus submarine and end up editing a HiFi publication, organising audio shows and lying on a hotel bed in Warsaw writing an article about somebody else’s enormous loudspeakers.
Life rarely follows the route you imagined it would, but that’s often the interesting bit.
Dreams are good. They give us something to aim towards and say a great deal about who we are, or perhaps who we would like to become. Your dreams are likely to be very different from mine, but they’re yours to pursue, alter, abandon or do whatever you will with. Not every dream has to become a business, a career or a loudspeaker fitted with sixteen drivers per pair. Some can remain hobbies, private ambitions or slightly ridiculous ideas that make life more entertaining. There’s no shame in deciding that a dream no longer suits you, either. We change, circumstances change, and what once seemed desperately important can suddenly lose its shine.
However, there is a difference between consciously deciding that a dream is no longer for you and dismissing it automatically because it feels too difficult, too impractical or too late.
I have a friend who is an amazing artist and currently has the opportunity to follow their dream of making a living as a working artist. If you’re reading this – and I hope you are – take heed and follow that dream while the opportunity presents itself. That doesn’t mean throwing all common sense out of the window, selling everything you own and moving into a garret with a beret, a palette and half a stale baguette. A flat in N Yorkshire with O(scar)TC should be enough. Following a dream doesn’t have to mean behaving recklessly. It can mean taking one step, then another, seeing what happens and being prepared to work incredibly hard if the opportunity begins to turn into something real.
Audrius didn’t wake up one morning with a completed Parallax loudspeaker standing in his living room. What began as a desire for a really good home audio system became a DIY project, then a collection of ideas, then an obsession and eventually a loudspeaker company. Years later, we’re in Warsaw looking at the physical result of that original dream.
That’s the thing about dreams: from the outside, people often see only the finished result. They see the company, the artwork, the product, the performance or whatever else the dream eventually became. They don’t see the false starts, the mistakes, the sleepless (but not dreamless) nights, the doubts or the moments when walking away would have been considerably easier.
I’m not suggesting that every passing thought should be pursued with fanatical determination. If I acted on every idea that arrived in my head, HiFi PiG Towers would currently contain an artisan coffee shop, a record label, a fragrance company, several ill-advised vehicles and at least one Lotus with a periscope. However, some dreams keep coming back. They prod away at you, refusing to disappear, and perhaps those are the ones worth listening to.
So, to all you dreamers out there, whatever stage of life you happen to be at, don’t dismiss your dreams as unattainable fantasies to be forgotten on waking. Take Audrius’s lead and try to make them a reality -or at least give them a proper go. They may work out exactly as you imagined. They may lead somewhere completely unexpected, or they may fall flat on their arse and become an amusing story you can tell years later. You won’t know unless you try, and you never know where life might take you. It might even take you to a hotel room in Warsaw, lying on a bed and writing about four enormous 15-inch woofers, a dentist’s Lotus and all the things you once imagined you might become.
I never did become a dentist or a fighter pilot, and I still don’t own a car that turns into a submarine. However, the dreams I did follow brought me here – and, as it happens, here isn’t at all bad.
Squadron Leader Stu
