Ton up for the tone masters

Celestion has published A Century of Sound, a commemorative book of words and archive photography celebrating its centenary. Jerry Gilbert, who played a major role in the research, takes us through the company’s history, which has navigated a world war, the Great Depression and countless twists, turns and takeovers

For 100 years, Celestion has focused largely on manufacturing one item: transducers. During that time the company has rewritten the loudspeaker lexicon, introducing phrases such as “brownsound”( immortalised by Hendrix and Van Halen) as well as “Creambacks”, “Pre-Rola Pulsonic Greenbacks” and “Alnico Blue” – all classic guitar speakers – with chat forums attracting fanboy guitarists aplenty, debating the minutiae of chassis and significance of ciphers. The company has also pioneered technologies that made bookshelf hi-fi suddenly affordable for the masses, latterly redefining transducers for large-scale pro audio.

For 100 years, Celestion has focused largely on manufacturing one item: transducers. During that time the company has rewritten the loudspeaker lexicon, introducing phrases such as “brownsound”( immortalised by Hendrix and Van Halen) as well as “Creambacks”, “Pre-Rola Pulsonic Greenbacks” and “Alnico Blue” – all classic guitar speakers – with chat forums attracting fanboy guitarists aplenty, debating the minutiae of chassis and significance of ciphers. The company has also pioneered technologies that made bookshelf hi-fi suddenly affordable for the masses, latterly redefining transducers for large-scale pro audio.

It was during the austere pre-war year of 1936 that the most famous legend of all, the Rola G12 general purpose permanent magnet radio speaker, unceremoniously appeared. A quarter of a century later, in newly minted form, it would provide the signature sound of the British beat boom as the idiom’s first dedicated guitar speaker. The magic behind the iconic Vox AC30 guitar amp and Marshall 4x12 stacks enabled guitarists to deliver harmonic destructive distortion as they drove their sound into gloriously saturated, sustained overload, shaking the Mullard valve circuits to within an inch of their lives. The alchemy that lay behind this was off the grid and, like so many inventions, was the result of a happy accident.

The company’s journey has seen it pivot into munitions during WW2 to help develop the British government’s prototype proximity fuse, capable of detonating an anti-aircraft shell when German V1 rockets came within lethal distance. Later, the parent company’s frivolous diversions into toy ducks and exotic ladies’ underwear provided a lighter touch.

According to current and longest-serving MD Nigel Wood, the centenary year is disappearing in a heartbeat. Starting with the North American NAMM Show in January, a celebratory roadshow has travelled to ISE in Barcelona, Prolight + Sound Guangzhou and PALM Expo India in Mumbai, with an upcoming visit in October to Shanghai’s Music China via a party at the Ipswich HQ in September. An iconic red London double decker bus adorned Celestion’s stand at NAMM, underpinning the company’s quintessential Britishness. Elsewhere, mock red telephone boxes served a similar purpose,

It’s unlikely that company founder Cyril French would have been aware of how significant 1924 would prove in the world of broadcast. Along with brothers Leonard and Edgar, he had taken over the Thames Valley Plating Works at 29 High Street, Hampton Wick, converting it to the Electrical Manufacturing and Plating Company. In the year that the moving coil principle was patented, he was improving the design of fellow pioneer Eric Mackintosh to secure patents on “free-vibrating edge” and later “clamped edge” speaker design principles.

Two years earlier, Marconiphone vintage wireless equipment had led to a tidal wave of applications for experimental broadcast licences. The British government issued just one: to a consortium known as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd, the forerunner of the behemoth that would become the BBC, which appeared in 1924. In a landmark year for broadcast, Big Ben and the Greenwich Time Signal rang across the airwaves for the first time and King George V’s voice was broadcast.

Enter Celestion. It was a third French brother, Ralph, who would coin the name; somewhat delicate for a utilitarian-sounding plating company. Prior to the formation of the Celestion Radio Co, “the Celestion” had been the name of a product launched in early 1925 housing radiophone loudspeakers with fabulously ornate fretwork, which went on to become highly sought-after.

By 1928 Celestion Radio Co was folded into the newly incorporated Celestion Ltd, quickly expanding into larger premises at 145 London Road, Kingston-upon-Thames and diversifying into reproducers for ships. When in 1931 it capitalised on the birth of the phonograph, the adventure was in full spate. Celestion successfully fended off the impact of the 1929 Great Depression before the boom era was brought to an abrupt end with the resignation of Cyril French and departure of Mackintosh in 1935.

Through the second half of the 1930s, British Rola – an offshoot of the American Rola Company – had been operating in lockstep with Celestion, making small speakers fitted inside the radios themselves from its facility in Park Royal, northwest London. When war broke out, British Rola began supplying the Air Ministry, while production at Celestion changed to munitions work. With the coming of peace, British Rola transferred from Devon to Ferry Works at Thames Ditton and, in August 1946, acquired Celestion, the two company names joining as Rola Celestion Ltd. But the company tumbled into administration, to be taken over in 1949 by tape recorder giant Truvox, chaired by the colourful Danny Prenn.

Incorporated as Rola Celestion in 1951, the company began production of coaxial speakers and re-entrant horns for industrial use, followed by the Ditton portfolio with the birth of the stereophonic LP. And it was at the start of the 1960s that the company would really make its name, thanks to the legendary Vox AC30 guitar amp. As the decibel levels created by screaming fans became ever higher, Shadows’ guitarist Hank Marvin needed something more muscular than the AC15’s speaker handling. So JMI/Vox’s Dick Denney worked with Celestion head engineer Les Ward to “beef up” the G12’s construction for this new application. This led to the G12 T530 alnico blue – a development of that old 1936 console radio speaker.

Meanwhile, across London, Marshall Amplification worked with Ward on developing its own G12 variant. The JTM 45, the company’s first closed-back cabinet, was uprated to four G12s, and the 4x12 stack configuration was born. A constellation of backline producers, including Laney, Orange, Selmer, Carlsbro, HH Electronics and Simms Watts, followed. With demand for the coveted formula outstripping the ability to supply, Celestion became virtual gatekeepers.

The hefty British Celestion magnets also attracted the attention of Charlie Watkins, founder of WEM, responsible for the first recognisable PA systems. Via Celestion, he set sail with his Wall of Sound slave PAs. Meanwhile, the success of Ditton at the Thames Ditton factory necessitated a transition to a bigger facility in Ipswich. At the same time, a reverse takeover of Weingarten Brothers clothing company by Truvox created the new publicly listed Celestion Industries plc.

Although the UK’s 1973 three-day week further blighted growth, Celestion continued to focus on industrial speakers in addition to the G12s, as well as affordable Ditton hi-fi. Then in 1982 came the revolutionary SL6 hi-fi speaker, which owed much of its success to the company’s forward-thinking investment in laser interferometry, enabling the fine vibrations of small sections of the speaker cone to be measured.

That same year, with the new roller disco trend infesting British nightclubs, Celestion designed a bespoke sound system for the UK’s biggest roller disco. The massive system was the company’s first move into loaded systems which, by the end of 1986, would yield the SR Series; the same year as Celestion released the classic Vintage 30 to the retail guitar market. The dual 8-inch concentric full-range SR1 came with separate crossover, injection moulded cabinet and integral aluminium dome. The evolved series would also introduce Aerolam, appropriated from the aerospace industry, a new surround called Flexirol and, later, another new technology, Paraflow. The SR series gained currency when Yes’s Rick Wakeman started using them for keyboard monitoring and Robbie Gladwell and Paul Airey created Celestion house band, Spank the Badger. Audiences would line the aisles at tradeshows to hear them, setting off a new industry trend.

By 1988, a group of City-based investors headed by Charles Ryder took over and, four years later, Celestion Industries divested itself of the loss-making loudspeaker division entirely. Hong Kong-controlled venture capital investment company Kinergetics Holdings (UK), whose majority shareholder was Gold Peak, acquired both Celestion and fellow hi-fi giant KEF Electronics, with manufacturing united under KH Manufacturing. The move to Gold Peak brought many advantages, and markets were reassured when the parent company announced a long-term investment commitment while enabling Celestion to remain uniquely British.

Celestion pressed ahead, its ongoing hi-fi drive taking early advantage of the company’s latest investment in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, introduced in 1992. At the beginning of the new century, its Partners in Tone programme brought a stellar lineup of endorsees to the guitar speaker brand, building on an earlier American initiative. Getting Slash onboard provided the turning point, while Eddie Van Halen’s influence brought a completely new sub-brand to the company with the EVH.

Since Celestion had already transferred nearly all its raw frame speaker manufacturing to the Gold Peak factory in Guangdong, downsizing in the UK became essential. Moving across Ipswich to Great Blakenham, the company streamlined production and test areas, installing a new laboratory complete with hemi-anechoic chamber and a purpose-built listening room while further embracing FEA capability. Advanced coaxial and compression driver design became its mission, Mark Dodd’s initial CDX driver having been expanded into a sizeable product range, leading to the AxiPeriodic CD with a neodymium magnet, titanium diaphragm and much wider bandwidth.

Celestion continued to attract high profile OEMs including Martin Audio, Turbosound and Funktion One, eager to embrace Celestion technology (and FEA) for their PA systems, just as Charlie Watkins had in the late 1960s.

Celebrating his own 20-year anniversary, Nigel Wood had arrived soon after the move to Great Blakenham. An industrialist with long term vision, he was immediately parachuted into the Frankfurt Musikmesse where he observed that: “Celestion were trying to serve many different markets – they were too spread and not focused.” He wasted no time pulling the company – which had already exited hi-fi – out of systems entirely, enabling it to promote core OEM assets, free from competing with its own customers. Adopting a simple formula, he has steered a steady course through the noise and clutter of two decades. As he succinctly puts it: “100 years ago we started making speakers; 100 years later we are still making them.”

There are other mantras, such as: “Compression drivers are complicated to make, so not everyone can do it. But that complexity is our friend.” And: “If it says ‘Celestion’ on the label, then we made it. We own our factories, which stops people cloning.”

China is where Celestion’s high volume commercial items are produced whereas hi-tech, lower volume and prestige production and “specials” remain firmly in the UK. To that end, it recently moved into the large-format woofer space, investing in a production line to deliver premium 15-, 18-, 21- and 24-inch driver performance for the OEM and DIY markets. “These are essentially for the North American and European markets,” explains Wood. “If we built them in Asia and shipped them over, the freight cost would be really expensive, so we might as well build them locally.”

The same principle prevails at Celestion’s recently acquired factory in Thailand which will initially manufacture mid-performance, large format speakers for the mass market. With two factories in Asia, it is significant that Celestion is also on the verge of expanding sales activity in APAC, according to Wood.

Running in parallel throughout, Celestion has fed generations of guitarists with its legendary sound. This legacy programme was right in engineering director Paul Cork’s wheelhouse, with faithful versions of iconic speakers being created via the Heritage Series, and newly conceived products using latest technologies to achieve higher power handling while preserving the hallowed tone. It ensures Celestion’s stock remains at the highest level.

Away from the visceral world, the company recently embraced the need for digital emulations with the new Impulse Responses – faithful representations of classic guitar speaker tones – followed by the launch of software compatible with the new generation Dynamic Speaker Responses (DSRs) which take IRs to the next level.

“There’s no change, we keep doing what we do,” says Wood, matter-of-factly, when asked about legacy. And while not strictly true as Celestion constantly strives to innovate, most recently venturing into patented waveguide technology, that ethos will probably continue to sustain the company into its second century.