Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Sidebar 3: Wes Phillips chats with Metaphor's Bill Peugh

Wes Phillips: How did Metaphor come about?

Bill Peugh: I made a conscious decision, while I was in college, that this was the industry I wanted to work in. That's how I made my living for the next 17 years: first selling hi-fi for Peter McGrath, and later as Director of Marketing for IAT, which distributed Goldmund in this country.

Karl Shuster worked with me at IAT. When it ceased to exist, we were practically forced to start our own business. Being pragmatic, I looked at high-end audio and saw that there were three areas where you could establish a successful company: wire, digital products, and speakers. I don't do cables, so that was out. Digital is fascinating, and I certainly had access to some of the best engineers around from my Stellavox/Goldmund days...but the last one, speakers, just seemed like a lot more fun. It seemed as if there was a lot more to work with. And on top of that, we knew Gerry Boyd, who had experience designing speakers. We set out to build a prototype. Deciding you want to do something is one thing; being able to do it well is quite another.

Neither Karl nor I had ever designed a speaker, but we had some definite ideas about what we wanted. Gerry, the only one of us with a clue about the difficulty involved, just laughed, saying, "You guys don't even know what you're getting into." Within a month, we had a prototype—a hideous-looking thing that's still in my garage—which we took to a nearby dealer to compare with other products. And, while I'd have to say that it had some serious problems, it also had tremendous potential. Karl and I were ecstatic at this point. Once again, Gerry was the lone voice of reason. "This is the easy part, guys; getting it close takes very little skill—taking it all the way is the hard part!" Of course, we weren't in the mood to hear that. So we decided to go for it.

Boy, was he right! We had a wonderful midrange unit and great woofers, but no matter how much we played with them—-or the box tuning—we couldn't get them to sound alike. This was a serious problem for those of us who wanted it to be coherent before it was anything else, and it drove us wacky. Out of frustration, we pulled the midrange out of the box and played it full-range in free air, and the sound that it made in free air was just like it sounded in the box! Then we pulled the woofers out and played them in free air, and they sounded just like they did in the box, too. Okay, we thought, back to the drawing board!

We sought midrange drivers that sounded more analogous to the woofers, and when we found them, we coated them with a substance with which we'd been experimenting. It was almost scary, they sounded so similar. Tuning the whole system got a lot easier after we began listening to the drivers in free air. Theory tells you that if the drivers spec out, you can make it all work by tuning the box, crossover, etc., etc. We found out otherwise. In order to design a speaker that sounded the way we wanted it to sound, the drivers had to have the same colorations—I mean, we all know that they're all colored. It's not a matter of are they colored? They all are. Since you're stuck with color, make it the same color.

I'd like to say that the crossover required a lot of experimentation; but after working like crazy and tuning by ear over a long period of time, we wound up exactly where Gerry had spec'ed it originally. I mean exactly. Which was a shock to him, too.

Phillips: What were you guys aiming for in designing the 2?

Peugh: Communication. I just read a new biography of Sam Cooke—so, of course, the first thing I did was pull out my old recordings and play them. Most of them are distorted, but when a system communicates, that never gets in the way of the music. Sam with the Soul Stirrers is a very different feeling from Sam at the Copa. Most audiophile speakers would make you say that these recordings stink, and you'd turn them off.

But on the 2s—I think—you can see Sister Flute pass out, you can feel Sam trying to "get over" to a nightclub audience...and these are very different experiences. Maybe the recordings do stink, but that's not what the message on the discs should be. The message should always overwhelm the vehicle, not vice versa. You know that price has nothing to do with it, because we can all listen to music on a car radio and enjoy it—I just don't understand why you can't get that same involvement out of something that's supposed to sound good. So that was our first priority with the Metaphor 2.

My function with the company is to set the height of the bar and then convince Gerry and Karl to jump over it; so when I envisioned the 2, I decided that I wanted everything: sensitivity, microdynamics, macrodynamics, speed, extension. I wanted a speaker that imaged like a mother but was easy to place in a room. Stuff that—typically—doesn't go together in a speaker. The 2 may not be state-of-the-art on any single level, but it's pretty darn close on every level. That balance, I think, is much more important than excelling at just one or two things. Our goal is to get people to buy this speaker—obviously—and then to keep it.

Like Quads. I tend to talk about Quads a lot, because I owned them for many years and I also used to sell them. People who bought Quads...you just didn't see 'em again, except socially and when buying records, perhaps. They just got off the merry-go-round, saying, "Fine. Now we can just listen to music."

There's something very, very satisfying about knowing that someone has bought a product and wants to keep it and enjoy it—that's the kind of product we determined to build. Metaphors, we hope, should be the end of Audiophilia nervosa rather than the cause of it. Twenty years from now we want people to talk about us as one of those products they bought—and kept.