Factory Tour: Inside Meyer Sound
Taking a walk through the “funny little audio company” that’s become a leader through emphasis on research and development

By Alex Artaud

Figure 1: The outside view of Meyer Sound in Berkeley.

Independently owned and managed by John and Helen Meyer from its humble beginnings in 1979, Meyer Sound has grown with a classic entrepreneurial model. No mergers, acquisitions or IPOs; rather, a premium on research, design and innovation that serves the art and science of professional sound, as well as those practicing it. Thus the Berkeley, California-based company has earned its place as a world leader in professional audio technology, employing about 150 people with regional sales offices in Australia, Belux, Germany, Mexico, Russia, and Spain.

Since its inception almost 25 years ago, Meyer Sound is best known for producing premium loudspeakers, but practical, integrative technologies such as MAPP Online, RMS, and the upcoming release of SIM III, are fundamental to the company’s philosophy.

“A lot of the design is not so much to make it innovative but to be practical and provide something that will hold up over time,” explains John Meyer. “You don’t want to build anything that’s so specialized that it’s just for one application.”

Figure 2: Final loudspeaker assembly, where it all comes together.

COME ON INSIDE Recently, I visited Meyer Sound for a walking tour through its complex of offices and manufacturing facilities in Berkeley. (Figure 1) It afforded a glimpse into a company in growth and transition, one that’s working to refine the flow between development, production, and delivery, while maintaining an ethos of handcraftsmanship. The company’s main entrance opens into a reception area that includes displays for numerous awards and patents.

(John Meyer and his engineering team hold more than 20 patents covering a range of applications, such as for the trapezoidal cabinet design and the alignment circuitry of the HD-1 High Definition Audio Monitor.) Nearby are executive offices plus facilities for Design Services and Technical Support departments, which work with consultants, contractors, and end-users to aid in system design as well as follow up on sales and assist on installations in progress.

Figure 3: The amplifier configuration room.

A short corridor leads back to a large area that includes sales and marketing. The open architecture of the room allows colleagues to quickly consult with each other. “One of the things that sets us apart from other manufacturers is that we have a commitment to deliver products within a two-to-three week period of time after point-of-order,” says Mark Johnson, Meyer Sound’s public relations manager. “We tried ‘just-in-time’, which worked for the auto industry ­ but they generally know in advance if there’s going to be a need for a huge batch of cars. It’s not like getting a call from a customer saying, ‘I’ve got a tour going out next week and need 48 M3Ds’.” The company also tried keeping large inventories of product, says Johnson, but that wasn’t cost-effective. Now, it’s a blend, where there are some stored products but most are built to order. It’s also a balancing act where one can’t easily predict the volume of demand nor the sector, so fluctuations need to be managed well.

Designing a flexible approach is part of the refinement process that continues not only within Meyer Sound’s current layout, but also in its new, ambitious MARS building slated to open as we go to press. More on that later.

BEGINNING AT THE END

Following a hallway past accounting offices leads to the Loudspeaker Manufacturing department, which includes the last stage of production, final assembly, and quality control. (Figure 2) Here, all cabinets are loaded with drivers, rigging and amplifiers, and then are fully tested. (Figure 3)

We walk past a test area outfitted with a couple of SIM units modified for in-house use. Baseline performance specifications for each product are stored and compared with the product during testing. Small products, like UPMs or UPAs, are carefully checked for on-axis and off-axis frequency response and phase response, as well as distortion. To test large products like M3Ds or MSL-6s, the SIM system gets rolled over to the assembly area. Despite the amount of activity in this shared space, there isn’t a hectic feeling here or anywhere else along this tour. Yet, that belies the fact that the entire industry has picked up its pace in recent years.

Figure 4: You’ve just landed on Saturn, Meyer style.

“I think the thing that’s changed the most has been the speed at which people expect us to create new technologies,” says Helen Meyer. “When we started the company, we had more time to design and build products. Now, people are expecting us to design and deliver products much faster. So we’ve had to use our creative energy to do things more rapidly and responsively. I think ‘responsively’ is the key word. And if we were just purely an R&D company, we wouldn’t have the motivation to create the products at the speed that we do.”

Moving on, we stop by Electronics Assembly, a division once dedicated to building controllers and equalizers. As the company’s products evolved into an almost exclusively self-powered line, more amplifiers and accompanying control electronics were manufactured here. Now, it’s filled with racks and racks of amps. Although extreme care is taken in all circuit board manufacturing processes, every board produced goes through multiple electronic and physical checks to ensure that they will withstand the rigors of the road or installation. This is especially important since the boards are all used in self-powered products that often have to survive in very humid areas.

Figure 5: Low-frequency cones getting weather resistance treatment.

HEADING FOR SATURN In 1995, Meyer Sound’s old warehouse location was redesigned and purpose-built as its new driver manufacturing facility. The Saturn building, as it’s known, is a sleek facility. (Figure 4) About 10 years ago, the company undertook a project to develop in-house design and manufacturing of high frequency drivers. Immediate goals were to achieve better consistency from unit to unit as well as lower the cost of production. “In the past, we’d get drivers in and perform various modifications, primarily to ensure greater longevity and the sample-to-sample performance consistency for which Meyer is known, and that was really a lot of time and effort,” says Johnson. “So we assembled a team to develop the high driver and this space.” (Figure 5)

Walking in, you first see a quality control section with “piano boxes” ­ large boxes that have acoustical treatment and measuring microphones on the inside. Drivers of different sizes can be mounted to their corresponding horn flange and the whole assembly is mounted on the piano box and tested. Again, SIM machines are provided at each station to test the frequency response, phase response, and distortion characteristics of the individual drivers.

Figure 6: Go here, get service. Duplicated worldwide!

“There’s even a handcrafted aspect to the production of the driver,” notes Johnson. He points to a microscope focused on a voice coil for a diaphragm. “Since the voice coil has been treated with a lacquer, the best way to attach the leads is under a microscope, very precisely removing the insulation and hand-soldering the leads onto the coil.” Next door to Saturn is the company’s main service center. Other factory-certified service centers operate in several countries, each modeled after this one so procedures can be easily duplicated. (Figure 6)

Everything from electronic to cosmetic work is handled in here, with loudspeakers being tested and calibrated using the smaller of the company’s two anechoic chambers.

Nearby is a prototype shop, equipped with lathes and saws. Small pre-production and product prototypes are built here, ensuring that what starts as an engineering concept in a CAD program can be turned into a working unit that will function as expected.

R&D AND A STOP BY MARS

Crossing the street, we enter Berkeley’s historic H.J. Heinz Building. (It was built in the 1920s as a plant for the food processing giant.) Since 1996, Meyer Sound’s R&D wing has been located here, including all electronic and mechanical design and development. (Figure 7)

“While we don’t do a lot of projects that are strictly research, there are a few very serious ones, such as our on-going project with the University of California,” says John Meyer. “I like to try to mix the practicality and the research so that we’re not doing one thing. We try to keep it flexible.”

And now the company’s 65,000-square-foot Meyer Assembly and Resource Services department (dubbed MARS) is up and running. This new loudspeaker production facility has been designed and built for an efficient flow as the product line moves through the assembly process. Mike Panko, Meyer Sound’s production and materials manager, one of four on-site supervisors for this project, offered some background on the new MARS facility.

Figure 7: The anechoic chamber, in its own building.

“About a year ago, we started having discussions with John and Helen about the potential of moving current manufacturing assembly into this new facility,” says Panko. “We formed a team to review manufacturing, material storage, and financial issues. We decided that the biggest bottleneck to increasing our throughput in our current facility is not having good material storage systems in place to allow the manufacturing process to continue seamlessly. With limited manufacturing space in the current facility, quantities accumulate at the back door during peak production. So, it was very convenient that the Heinz building became available just as Meyer Sound was ready to grow at an even faster pace.”

Panko notes that the main objective for MARS was that it be a flexible environment, with a floor plan that could fluidly shift from, say, assembly of four-pound loudspeakers to those weighing much more. “One of our other challenges is that we currently build in a cellular environment, where a loudspeaker is brought to an assembly point and it stays there,” explains Panko. “People then bring materials to that loudspeaker, assemble it in place, and move it to a test site.”

To aid product movement, the company has built ‘rovers’ for MARS work areas ­ movable workbenches with heavy-duty wheels that can be pushed into position on an ‘island’ location and locked into place. The height of both rover and island are the same, so the staff will have a large 50-foot by 60-foot surface for easier maneuvering. When the work is completed, the brakes can be released and the product rolled to the next assembly zone.

ANOTHER 25?

I asked John Meyer if there were any companies he respected and viewed as examples to follow. “Well, I admire companies like Nikon and Zeiss,” replies Meyer. “They don’t have a range from crummy to wonderful, and they seem to have created a culture that’s self-sustaining. But, that’s an elusive quality; it’s not something you can write down and have everybody read every day. A sense of sustainability has to become part of the culture of the company. I think we’re starting to do this and attracting people to come work here because of it.”

Meyer also acknowledges how much the company’s public image has changed since the company began. “Twenty years ago, we were called that funny little audio company in Berkeley. We’re not called that anymore!” he says. “I think that the two decades it took our company to develop is like a tree that’s been established ­ and one of our challenges over the next 10 years is to evolve systems that will sustain it. This is an ongoing thought within all levels of the company, and one of my goals is to create those systems.”

Alex Artaud is a musician and writer living in Oakland, California.

May 2003 Live Sound International