Heiner Basil Martion did not suspect that three years would pass until he finally found a suitable replacement in a RCF 15 bass driver with Sandwich Composite Membrane and Neodymium Magnet, when the old chassis manufacturer discontinued production of the bass drivers. The new bass chassis, which is manufactured exactly like the RCF 1.5-inch high-midrange driver, with a paper diaphragm and Neodymium magnet according to Martion specifications, prompted the Berliner to revise the concept of the Bullfrog in order to increase the performance, and also carry out a facelift.”

“Coaxial construction: Both the RCF 15-inch Bass drivers as well as the 1.5-inch high-frequency unit – both with sandwich composite membrane and neodymium magnet are elaborately modified by Martion. In order to achieve the lowest frequencies in the the small housing the cone is soft suspended.
The concave, twisted aluminum rings act as horn extension and serve a deeper decoupling of the horn. By the defined distance between the rings and between the rings and the case, the bass is radiated in all directions. In addition, the rings offer a practical protective function which also contributes positively to the design. They replace the ugly protective grille of the old Bullfrog.”

“As before, the Bulli is a compact two-way coaxial horn speaker, which is designed as a minimum phase stable point-source with concentrically arranged drivers. The two RCF drivers are specially modified by Martion from the baskets, through the membranes to the suspensions. Of course, the designer did not want to tell me what exactly he is working on – as an innovator, he has nothing against imitators in principle, but something against copiers. So much seems to be certain: the high midrange and bass unit play five octaves each, the bass rolls off at around 680 hertz. This important transition is phase stable, so acoustically not recognizable (not even in our measurements). The high-midrange is behind the bass, the two diaphragms make the same movements for the mentioned frequency, the compression driver being used a little earlier to bridge the distance between the two drivers.”

“Horns are like wild horses”

Despite the rather elitist scene of Martion users, which is due on the one hand to the music division and on the other hand to the price – for the small Bullfrog you put an impressive 6,200 euros (passive) or 7,200 euros (active) on the table -, Behind the company name is one of the warmest people I have been able to interview so far: company founder Heiner Basil Martion.

I meet the Berliner by choice in his home base on the outskirts of Berlin to talk to him about his company, club music, acoustics and of course horns. Over a cup of tea served by his wonderful partner Rikta, surrounded by vinyl and the entire range of horns on the opposite side of the room, I immediately got caught up in a conversation with the likeable inventor about sound engineering and techno.

Heiner, how did you get to the horn, what is your career and what is your background?

The Martion company has been around since 1972. When I came to Berlin at the time, I met Klaus Heinz, the founder of the Arcus company. At that time, Arcus was the epitome of the aspiring German speaker scene, and that’s where I started. Back then as a young person, I always made music in bands. I was a singer and guitarist, and of course we didn’t have the money for our own PA.

So I tried to somehow produce and build everything myself, using the classic method, by trying to copy instructions from books. When I moved to Berlin, I went to a disco that had two Paragons as PA. Paragon is the classic hi-fi Rolls-Royce that JBL built back in the 1950s. A huge showcase almost three meters wide, equipped with two 15-inch monitors and huge alnico magnets. As a child I had seen and heard this loudspeaker at a radio exhibition, that was in 1963. There was a drum solo on such a system, and I tell you, it was better than live! That was the decisive experience that stuck in my bones forever. My personal moon landing.

So this system was in the Berlin disco, where I was a regular from then on and where I also met Klaus Heinz. That was my mecca. Back then he had a small hi-fi shop in Berlin and knew God and the world. Among others, Oscar Heil, one of the three “greats” in electro-acoustics that I got to know in my life: Oscar Heil, Paul Klipsch and Harold Beverege.

All old boys who unfortunately have already blessed the time and were the pioneers in loudspeaker development. Oscar Heil built the “Heil Air-Motion Transformer”, an “accordion” tweeter, and Harold Beverage personally built a loudspeaker for me that cost around 23,000 DM back then in 1974 – a pretty impressive sum for a student, back then how today, but I just really wanted this thing … The speaker was a so-called full-range electrostat, consisting of three elements that look like bathroom windows with an acoustic lens. It looked like a strangely cut onion with a large area working on a small slit.

The part sounded just brilliant, not loud and not defining the room, but the sound had something that I have come to love totally: serenity. Nothing strained, you could listen to any music about it for hours without straining your ears. I have always used this Beverege loudspeaker as a reference. He told me by my horns where to go. Whereby horns are the exact opposite of the fine electrostats. Horns are like wild horses – during development I was always able to look back at the beverage, which then told me how it should sound. Harold was my sound guru, if you will. I met him at IFA 1977 in Berlin. I was in awe of him at the time because he always took the time to explain something very precisely when you asked him something.

The Klipsch Horn was developed in the 1940s. It caused an incredible sensation and is built almost unchanged to this day. Klipsch was such a guru to me too. He hasn’t changed that much about these corner horns, they already existed before. The corner horn is one of the most ingenious ideas anyway, because if you imagine that the thing should now generate a bass of 30 Hz, then it would have to have such a large opening that the whole device would not fit through any door or garage door. Then someone came up with the idea: “Wait a minute, we have tubas and trumpets, where the tone is often wrong in the instrument until it comes out. So: let’s fold a bass horn! That is, the sound goes back and forth, up and down. We then provide, similar to the trumpet template, like a mouthpiece in the corner of a room. If you look at the corner of a room now, what do you see? That’s a horn too. (laughs) So we build a mouthpiece, slide it into the corner of the room and we don’t need to build a horn anymore because it’s already there!

Ok, so what’s the horn here again?

Here the horn is the box with the mirrors in front of it. The mirrors were such an ’80s fashion. The bass loudspeaker sits exactly in the center behind the mirrors, i.e. exactly in the middle, and also radiates to the front. Only it does not radiate forward, as I do now with a Bullfrog or another classic loudspeaker, but rather it radiates into a slot that is defined. That means: He is sitting on a board where there is only a slot in front of the bass. This slot then goes up and down and the bass is diverted, like an instrument such as a tuba. Then it is led from above and from below to the back, and from behind again around the corner into the corner. Then it opens, such as B. with a gramophone. The bass then opens into the room from there.

So traditionally we are practically in the horn. And that’s exactly what makes it possible to reproduce a tone of over 30 Hz at this size, which you also perceive as such, with the corresponding degree of efficiency, i.e. with this crack that sits behind it. That’s just the genius of the horn. That’s why my saying is now: “There is no reason not to use a horn!” Beethoven, for example, has already made use of this, he had this cow horn on his ear in order to be able to hear better. This also applies the other way round: The first sound recordings were made in such a way that a singer sang into a funnel, then it was cut one-to-one on a wax or something similar, and then you could then play it back. So the horn has great advantages in every direction.

A high degree of efficiency?

The horn increases the efficiency of a loudspeaker. Der Leihe says: A horn amplifies what is wrong, because the whole system is passive and nothing is amplified. The ingenious thing about the horn principle is that you connect the small driver to the room via the horn. Normal loudspeakers hit the room immediately, and even a 15 “loudspeaker is relatively small compared to the room. The horn, on the other hand, connects the driver with the room and thus creates this transition much better. That makes a difference of almost 10 dB – and 10 dB is a lot. For an increase of 3 dB you need twice the power. The horn does that by itself, just because of its shape. The size of the horn determines the lower limit frequency. The bigger a horn is, the deeper it can go. This of course creates a problem with bass frequencies.

How did the orgone develop?

The CD came out in the early 1990s and I thought the whole thing was terrible. In Germany there was a huge hype about the CD, Germany has adapted to it the fastest of all countries. Countries like England or America needed much longer for this, but in Germany this digital, pure one was very well received. I then listened to it myself and thought to myself: »Oh dear, that doesn’t work!« Since the hype got bigger and bigger and it looked like everyone was only listening to this cold digital music, I told myself that I was going to should stop.

Who should I build great speakers for if nobody can hear it anyway, because everyone only hears this quark. So I looked for another job. Because I had been to India a few times before and got to know a guru there, I went to India, and of course they immediately got me for sound stuff there. It was a huge Ash Ram with a huge tent that 4,000 people went into, and of course they needed sound! I then built a PA using Stone Age methods. I carved horns with a Swiss Army knife … no joke! The system I built there played for decades.

Then I thought to myself that I wanted to change direction completely and became a therapist. I then trained as a universal therapist for everything for six years. At the end of the training, one thing was crystal clear: I definitely didn’t want to be a therapist anymore! (laughs) I wanted to build speakers again – that was in the late 1990s. I then developed the orgone and noticed that I was treating myself through it. It took me about 3 to 4 years to develop the orgone until I came to useful results. In 2000 there was the premiere at the High End. That was absolute madness, because suddenly I, the little kitchen screwdriver, was the center of the acoustics world. Everyone at my booth was simply big, had heard orgone and was simply enthusiastic about the sound. That was the breakthrough. Then Thomas Brinkmann received an orgone, Ricardo too, and so it slowly spread. All over the world the parts are now standing around, in Australia, the USA and Ibiza … of course.

Where does the name orgone come from and what  does it mean? 

Orgone is an artificial name that originally came from Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst, and for him it means the energy of the universe. I like sound words very much: orgone, organic, organ, orgasm, it’s all somehow in the word.

BULLFROG

In addition to the large orgone, which is still looking at me from the other end of the room during the interview, it is above all the smaller Bullfrog box that has successfully made its way into the studios and directors of house / techno producers all over the world. The compact cube is offered as an active and passive speaker and, due to its design, is suitable for both studio use and as a small PA for small rooms, such as the club of visionaries in Berlin. Martion also provided the sound there and certainly played its part in the club’s great success. It is one of those places around the world where you can “experience music as it is really meant” – a phrase that is heard quite often.

About the Bullfrog model: I always ask myself what is the function of the Rudolf-the-red-nosereindeer ball?

It’s a two-pronged story: 50% of that nose is optics. So there is not just a boring black hole, but an optical center. In addition, the sphere ensures an even dispersion of the high-frequency part, i.e. the high tones that are first emitted in a directional manner with every loudspeaker, regardless of the color – roughly speaking: like a flashlight.

This ball divides this horn into three parts, so to speak. There is a very funny physical analogy to this: If you imagine that you have a small round pond in your garden. If you throw in a stone, a circular wave is created that goes all the way to the edge and is wonderfully reflected back from this round edge. Then it moves inwards again and so on. It then takes a while until the wave is gone. But if you divide the pond surface into three parts, for example with three boards, and you throw your stone in, then the waves immediately disappear due to the different angles that are then present in the pond.

Eddy currents occur everywhere – they can be found in cars or in space, in the Milky Way. And uncontrolled eddies arise in a horn as well. The more you divide it, i.e. the smaller you make the subdivision, the more the effects of the eddies are suppressed, because we don’t want them. Hence the division into three by the red ball. You can also take the Bullfrog like this, because it’s only one option. That means you have to pay an extra 200 euros for two noses.

I always find it interesting where people come from who order speakers from me. Many of them come, of course, because they are DJs themselves or because they heard about me through Ricardo Villalobos. This is of course the best advertising medium. Ricardo and I have known each other for around 15 or 20 years and we have a very good relationship. We often sit together and then mostly listen to classical music, for example Jordi Savall and stories like that, medieval music and such. Very rarely does it happen that we listen to techno or something. He’s totally into it. And what I find so unbelievable about him, when you hum a melody of a certain song to him, then he immediately knows what you mean and takes it off the shelf. Madness, what a musical memory he has!

I’m always amazed at how you can have such a high output, such energy, and then play music during the week. Yeah, it just hangs in the studio. Then family, two children. And he’s totally insane when it comes to music. The best thing was when he got his first Bullfrog, he wrote me the following text message: “You know, Basil, I can only hear half as loud as before, but much more!” “Wow,” I thought, “that’s it a compliment! «(laughs) I know that when the DJs sit in front of their speakers for six hours, you get big ears quickly. The quieter and cleaner you can hear, the more pleasant it is. That is of course clear.

Hearing protection is also an important issue. Very important! I always ask the DJs when I’m at events whether they also have hearing protection. They have enough money now. They can be individually adjusted so that the earplugs filter out certain frequencies and lower the volume. In addition, one of the most important elements of music is silence. What is it, where can it still be found today? It is becoming less and less common these days. And according to my philosophy, music is actually nothing more than punctuation of silence. One also says: In the beginning there was silence. And then there was the noise.

Yes, and breaks are notes too …

Exactly, silence is very important. And that you give your own hearing a break at night so that you have an idea of ​​what silence is like again. Because this constant pull is an unbelievable burden not only because of the sense of hearing, but also for the whole nervous system. And then the horns set the tone again, because they operate out of silence, so to speak.

CHECK OUT

I could have talked to HB Martion for ages, but we were already excessively excessive and I should have been on the tram for my next interview at the other end of town by now. But HB won’t let me go: “Wait, we still have to do the most important thing, we have to hear the system once!” He presses play and the first bass drums of a brutal Thomas Brinkmann number are thundering through the room.

I know the sound of the Martion horns quite well, as Martion speakers are also installed in my regular club, the vault in Cologne’s Westbahnhof. But the experience of being able to experience a perfectly measured system in the developer’s living room myself beats every club evening by far for me. While I am fascinated by the techno piece, HB flips through his photo album next to me to a picture of a man with a chainsaw. “Oh, there he is, Thomas. It was through him that I got into the techno scene in the first place. In proper style with a chainsaw in hand and an orgone in the background, the good one, to match the music! «Again a Brinkmann saw sound can be heard over the opposite horns – I rush to the train …