Martin Ku, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, Devialet, reveals how his company has created one of the best sound quality products in the market

Devialet likes to highlight that its range of products produce a unique signature sound. Their goal is to recreate for their listeners the same raw emotion many often experience when listening to a live musical performance.

Blown away by sound quality

It is these lofty ambitions and the excellence of their sound products which attracted Martin Ku, their Regional Director, Asia Pacific, to the company in the first place. He readily admits, however, that when he first got a call in 2018 from a head-hunter for role with Devialet, he initially turned it down, partly because he had never heard of the brand. 

It was only when the head-hunter contacted him again and put a little bit more context around it that he started to investigate a bit further. He was impressed with the wide range of “very smart people” who had invested in the company – the likes of Bernard Arnault, Jay-Z, Foxconn, and Naver – and he wanted to understand why. 

The “wow” moment

The company’s “beautiful” speaker called the Phantom was the main product. Ku was intrigued, he had never heard of it.

He was based in the mainland at the time, and decided to call his brother, who was a professional jazz musician in Shanghai. Now speaking at the contemporary lifestyle store, Andante, founded by Tony Luk in 2004 and located in the Ruttonjee Centre in Hong Kong, he fondly recalls the lightbulb moment, saying: “I brought him to one of the stores in Shanghai to listen and we put some songs onto the speaker, just Bluetooth. And he’s looking at me with his eyes wide open and it is like, ‘wow, what is that?’”

He knew this was an amazing product that many people still had yet to know about and he wanted to be part of the team spreading the message. Following a round of interviews, he then quickly joined the company. His outstanding background in fashion and technology was considered a perfect fit, reflecting the Devialet brand identity, which is a merger of design and technology.

Groundbreaking technology

Ku reveals why ADH® technology – which was introduced in 2010 when Devialet brought out the D-Premier – was so groundbreaking for an amplifier.

The technology originated from a very simple idea from the founder of Devialet. “Our founder at the time was thinking about how do I take the quality of an analog speaker and put it into the size and user friendliness of a digital speaker. It is really a simple idea, but incredibly difficult to do,” says Ku.

The landscape at the time had two different versions of audio tech amplification. Analog audio was very high quality sound replication coming from very large speakers, with very large wires. “You have amplifiers, you have streamers, you have digital analog converters, a lot of equipment for very involved users,” says Ku.

Then there was the range of amplification based on digital technology. These were the everyday at-home usage type of speakers which were small, cheaper. For these devices the quality of the sound was compressed.

“So just like a photograph or a video, if you want to look at something on a small device, then you don’t need it to have so much detail, because in a small device, a small picture, that’s all you can see,” explains Ku. “But if you were to blow that thing up into a large photograph, you would see very blurry parts of all those different pixels.”

Ku says it’s exactly the same on a digital product, specifically a digital speaker. “When you want to hear the details of that sound, they’re all gone, because the sound files all have to get compressed down in order to be able to play on such a small speaker and at such low power,” he reveals.

The revolutionary aspect of ADH® technology was to use an analog amplifier to replicate the sound quality coming from whatever source someone is playing on, and then to use a digital amplifier to push the power. 

Impressive range of functionalities

The Premiere also comes with a range of audio functionalities. “You have the amplifier, you have a streamer, you have a digital analog converter, you have a preamp, and we took all of these things and combined them into one very sleek and compact design,” says Ku, emphasising how novel this was at the time.

“That one product that catapulted Devialet into the hi-fi industry overnight,” he says of this impressive achievement.

Devialet Astra reaches notch higher

In terms of quality and sound performance the Devialet Astra has gone to the next level, according to Ku. 

“Everything that we are trying to do is to perfect that sound quality, and try to use that power of sound to drive some kind of emotion out of our listeners. That’s the main goal,” he says, adding that the new product manages to achieve this aspiration through the enhanced use of ADH technology.

Ku reveals that the quality of sound emitted is very clear throughout the different range of sound frequencies, with notable improvements on the higher frequencies. The product is hi-res certified.

Customize with different speakers

The Speaker Active Matching (SAM) is the fundamental technology within the Devialet Astra.

“And the really cool thing about this technology is that we can customize the signal processing of our Devialet Astra amplifier to match the performance of different speakers,” says Ku.

This is because the company holds a library of over a thousand different speaker models that they have done precision measurements of. They know how these speakers perform and can adapt the signal production from their amplifier to match the speaker. This information store is critical in that it allows the technology to push the speaker to perform at its highest extent under safe conditions, that is without overdoing it. Furthermore, Devialet is continuously updating their library to incorporate new speaker systems.    

Fantastic user experience

Aside from the technology and the sound quality, another pillar of the new product which is the enhanced user experience.

Their new software platform brings Devialet Astra onto the same platform as all their other speakers. “Everything’s on the same application and that will allow us to also keep these products on the same platform in the years to come,” reveals Ku.

“It has the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology so that you have greater stability, but also a little bit more versatility in what you can do with the products,” he says.  

The connectivity aspect means the users can now listen to the product in the way they want to listen to it – whether it’s through different streaming platforms or through USB, a CD player, or a record player. “Airplay two, Google Cast, Spotify, Connect, Tidal, UPnP – all these capabilities and connectivity have been added into the product,” says Ku.

He reveals another significant improvement is that all the customization is done within your app on your phone. This includes everything involving the setup and also the configuration – resulting in a much simpler and user-friendly process. 

“It’s very, very intuitive. It’s very simple, which for the people who knew the previous products, sometimes it wasn’t so. It was a bit more technical, but more complicated,” says Ku.

Unfiltered sound

Over 200 patents were needed to build a system whose aim is to authentically recreate the incredible sounds that artists are making. Experiencing the emotion someone might get from a live performance in an opera House or in a concert hall is the ultimate goal. 

“Our job is to take that sound, what the artist is trying to create, and recreate that in a completely unfiltered way. And our technologies have been able to do this in a very unique way, because we are able to create in very small packages, we’re able to create sounds across the spectrum of sound frequencies that are even beyond the scope of hearing,” says Ku.

The product comes in two different versions. The standard version is the bronze version. Their partnership with the Opéra de Paris has spawned another version in which the gold leaf logo is applied by the same ateliers who apply the gold leaf within the walls of the opera house. No two products are the same because they are all hand applied.

“I think it’s a really meaningful partnership, but also a good representation of this marriage between art, design and technology coming together and building this product,” says Ku.