Taking an idea and transforming it into reality requires a lot of hard work from a specialised development team. This team consists of product planners, designers, manufacturers and plenty of strong coffee.
But the team behind our high-end loudspeakers works a bit differently. In fact, it’s not a team at all. Every step of the process, from brainstorming ideas to fine-tuning the final components of each speaker, is done by just one man - Yoshiyuki Kaku.
Joining Sony in 1989 after earning a degree in physics, Yoshiyuki has had a passion for audio ever since falling in love with live classical music as a child, and he is now the man behind the likes of the formidable AR1 - our ultimate flagship speaker that rewards careful listening, recreating sound just as it was recorded. Yoshiyuki is never happy until each speaker is perfect, and to achieve products of this calibre he works tirelessly on every aspect of their development.
The sound of a speaker is influenced by almost every aspect of the development process - the position of the drivers, the shape of the speaker cavities, even the placement of the loudspeaker itself - but Yoshiyuki wanted to achieve the ultimate listening experience by constructing the whole of the AR1 from the perfect-sounding wood. He ran extensive tests, experimenting with woods of all kinds in a bid to capture the exact sound he envisaged. “When I hear the music out of the speaker, I should not feel the difference between the image I have in my memory,” he says while discussing how he defines a great speaker. “It has to come to me as naturally as possible.”
His tests and experiments led him to settle on maple - a wood that’s hugely popular among musical instrument makers for the bright tone it gives to the sound. But Yoshiyuki didn’t want to settle on regular maple. He wanted something extraordinary.
He scoured different countries in search of maple with the perfect look, feel and grain and ended up in Hokkaido - Japan’s second largest island in the north of the country. The cold, frosty climate gives the maple an extremely tight grain by the time it’s harvested in November, and is responsible for the AR1’s stunning, natural sound quality. “[Hokkaido maple] has the most beautiful sound out of all the maple I have tried,” Yoshiyuki says.
The AR1’s front baffle is constructed from this prestigious wood, but Yoshiyuki quickly realised that using it for the whole of the cabinet would result in a hardness to the overall sound. Faced with a new challenge, he jumped on a plane to Norway and came across a unique Nordic birch that was hardened by the country’s similarly cold weather. It was exactly the kind of wood that Yoshiyuki was looking for, and so the foundation of the AR1 was born.
Yoshiyuki has been on this one-man mission for 25 years now, constantly travelling across the globe to source rare materials that will help him achieve the perfect sound, and it’s this passion and enthusiasm that we put into every one of our products. Whatever Yoshiyuki works on next, you can guarantee he won’t settle for second-best.
