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May 5, 2010
K-Array’s Unconventional Loudspeakers Provide Answers To Diverse Application Questions
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K-array
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COMPANY: K-array
HEADQUARTERS: Florence, Italy
DEVELOPMENT: Having established
itself in rental, K-array has quickly diversified
into the installation sector with
designs that continue to defy convention.
For all those conference rooms
where there is insufficient depth for
a speaker enclosure of the right size,
all those retail stores where sound
equipment cannot use up vital display
space, and all those museum exhibits
where loudspeakers are just plain
visually unacceptable…we need a
company like K-array.
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For the installation market, K-array has developed the KK series line arrays, the KT20 circular
point-source loudspeaker which produces 101dB of maximum continuous SPL despite
having a diameter of just 2.5 inches, and, perhaps most spectacularly of all, the new KZ10
miniaturized line-array element (pictured), which deploys a row of four 0.5-inch diameter
drivers and has been designed to mount on any flat surface such as a wall or a table.
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Formed earlier this decade by
the directors of one of central Italy’s
most prominent rental/staging and
systems integration companies,
K-array has grown rapidly on the
back of some seriously innovative
loudspeaker products. Initially these
were focused on the rental market,
with designs such as the KH4, the
so-called ‘flat panel’ line-array boxes
that require minimal depth above the
stage, as well as minimal space when
being transported from one event to
the next.
“We consider ourselves doubly
blessed,” said Alessandro Tatini,
K-array’s youthful managing director.
“On the one hand, we have
been contractors and rental/staging
people ourselves, so we are familiar
with the problems they face and it’s
easy for us to put ourselves in their
position. That knowledge feeds
directly into our R&D program. On
the other hand, we are not tied to a
particular technology and we don’t
compete directly with the larger
manufacturers.”
Having established itself in rental,
K-array has quickly diversified into
the installation sector with designs
that continue to defy convention.
These include the ultra-slim KK
series line arrays, the KT20 circular
point-source loudspeaker which produces
101dB of maximum continuous
SPL despite having a diameter of just
2.5 inches, and, perhaps most spectacularly
of all, the new KZ10 miniaturized
line-array element, which
deploys a row of four 0.5-inch diameter
drivers and has been designed
to mount—almost invisibly—on any
flat surface such as a wall or a table.
“Our products enable high-quality,
high-SPL audio to be heard in
places where previously, because of a
lack of space, or the lack of an aesthetically
acceptable solution to the
architect or customer, it would not
have been possible,” Tatini stated.
The K-array brand made its U.S.
debut last year when its recently
appointed distributor, Sennheiser
Electronic Corporation, supplied a
mixture of self-powered KH4 midhigh,
KS4 low-mid, and K070 subbass
units to the Summerfest music
festival in Milwaukee, WI. Success
in the installation sector seems certain
to follow, but Tatini conceded
that the company needs to be canny
about how it markets its products,
in order to overcome contractor preconceptions:
“Sometimes it can be
difficult to assess how competitive we
are, because we do not make boxes
that have equivalents in the catalogs
of the more established manufacturers.
What we’ve begun to do is make
cost comparisons on a project basis,
rather than an enclosure basis. We
look at how a job could be completed
with our products, and how it could
be done with other people’s, that’s
the clearest way to make the comparison
and show the contractor that
there is a viable alternative to what
they already know.”
K-array began by manufacturing
its own loudspeakers at its current
headquarters, but today most production
comes from a range of facilities
close to Florence. This gives the
company the ability to keep an eye
on quality control, without tying it to
a particular production method, as
Tatini explained:
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Alessandro Tatini, K-array’s youthful managing director.
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“If you make a big investment in
CNC equipment, you inevitably look
at ways to get a return on that investment,
and that means designing more
wooden boxes. The same would be
true of injection moulding—that
would oblige us to design more and
more plastic boxes. But we don’t
want to be wedded to wood or plastic.
We like working with steel and
aluminum, we feel they have a lot of
potential. But ultimately, we simply
want to design the best product to do
a particular job, then decide how and
where it can be produced.”
And there is no let-up in the pace
of K-array’s activity, in terms of either
business or R&D. On the back of 67
percent revenue growth in the past 12
months, the company is continuing to
develop new products to fill market
voids. Coming soon, for instance, is
an installation speaker with builtin,
DMX-controllable LED lighting,
based on the KJ50vb variable-beam
monitor that, ingeniously, can be
floor- or ceiling-mounted. The idea
to add lighting came from Italy’s
sophisticated night-venue market.
And, on the basis that such places
tend to need more lights than they do
speakers, K-array will even be marketing
a speaker-less version of the
product.
That might seem odd. After all,
whoever heard of an audio company
producing something that makes no
sound? Yet it is utterly in keeping
with the K-array philosophy of being
free to do what the market demands,
regardless of convention.
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