Loewe, the German speaker and TV maker, has just announced that it’s launching a new venture called Loewe Systems. According to the company, this is “a new Berlin-based company focused on developing fully integrated high-end audio and audiovisual solutions for automotive manufacturers, luxury residences, superyachts, recreational vehicles, and other premium mobility applications.”
The new team consists of Managing Director Alexander Meisen, Director of Acoustics Ajan Hannemann, and Director of Automotive Engineering Robert Schletze. The team comes from a background of working on the Burmester audio systems in Mercedes-Benz cars, so has a strong in-car audio heritage.
To find out more about the goal of this new team, I spoke with the three members of the Loewe System crew, as well as Loewe’s CEO Aslan Khabliev.
TechRadar: What’s the goal for you guys of pushing into the integrated installation systems market?
Alexander Meisen: We did projects in residential and one-off projects, and this is really where we see people smiling. This is really where we can create stories. With the new setup with Loewe, creating those kind of experiences this is clearly where we see lots of potential.
TechRadar: What what will success look like for you going into this market?
Alexander Meisen: Clearly more than just adding a brand to projects to speaker grilles in automotive. Really going deep, really creating a special sound signature, really creating outstanding experiences with future partners.
TechRadar: You mentioned the sound profile. Is that one of the main things that will make Loewe’s offering unique, or what else do you think will make will make people want to see that brand on the design?
Robert Schletze: I think it’s a lots of things, but starting in an automotive project, it’s specific knowledge of how to specify the speakers, how to integrate the speakers in the car, partner up with the right partners, having our own sound signature, knowing how to tune a car with 37 speakers like an orchestra [when you’re] sitting in the middle, knowing what to do with delays, gains, filters… all that stuff comes together [in our] knowledge.
TechRadar: What are other companies doing wrong that you think you can do differently to win over the the car makers?
Alexander Meisen: There are massive changes and shifts in in-car audio. That’s especially where we see lots of potential, because in this field it became quite common to just add a logo to speaker grilles, make it look fancy and try to tell stories — I mean, there’s no real USP, there’s no real story. So we really go into what Robert just explained, and then in addition, we know that in the hi-fi market or in audio market in general we see a certain lack of really activating partnerships, really communicating and kicking off marketing campaigns together.
This is clearly one of the reasons why we decided to set this up under the Loewe and also Cabasse brand, because Loewe is already doing this — Loewe can offer that to potential partners. And Loewe also has a long heritage, and the feedback we’re getting right now from potential partners we’re talking to is ‘Hey guys, we don’t just want to put the name somewhere from a certain brand which is maybe famous or recognized in a certain area. We really want to create those experiences together’ — and this is where we’re very confident we can offer those [companies] the full package with all the different aspects
TechRadar: Is in-car audio the primary area of the Loewe Systems project? Loewe has history in this area with BMW, so it makes sense.
Alexander Meisen: There is this history, and yes, automotive is clearly the priority to us. This is where our team has lots of expertise. This is where the network is established. This is where… we haven’t released the news officially, but we are in talks. There are certain lead times when it comes to establishing new partnerships, but yes, clearly and absolutely [in-car audio is the priority].
Still we’re also talking to potential partners in the field of residential building on integrated systems, because the great thing for for us as a team right now is also we have full access to all the expertise and products of Loewe Group. We’re not only talking about audio, we’re talking about the full experience, which is also the visual element.
TechRadar: What do you see as the ultimate in-car offering from Loewe? Does it stretch to the displays as well as the audio and the DSP?
Robert Schletze: It’s an overall experience in the car. You look at the market, there are video screens already integrated lots of them [regardless of the] brand that they’re coming from. You have the audio part, you have smell in the car — you can connect all together, so it’s an overall experience. Why not add this visual area from Loewe if it works and we can partner up? Anything is possible there. Currently we’re figuring it out — we know where our expertise is, and we as we said we’re not just just adding elements to a car. We’re working together hand in hand [with manufacturers] for the full experience.
TechRadar: Are we talking about Dolby Atmos in cars, or what kind of premium experience are you aiming for?
Robert Schletze: I think Dolby Atmos is a standard now in the automotive area anyway. Yeah, of course. 3D sound, 4D sound, 2D sound.
Alexander Meisen: We’ve worked with the teams of Dolby before. We know them pretty well. So, this is one aspect, but it’s not new anymore. It’s not outstanding. It’s more like a given to us.
TechRadar: Is there something else new that you guys have in mind that you can bring?
Alexander Meisen: The manufacturers are asking for new features, especially when you compare the markets. You have a look on the European market and then you check the Chinese market and there are there are different demands and requests. We know that we will come up with features that are not [widely available] yet, but we cannot communicate them right now because we’re at a very early stage.
Robert Schletze: We have some past experience with what’s missing in the market. We’ve got some ideas there, and partners that we can develop them with. But overall I think you have to go back from adding feature over feature over feature — you have to go back to not adding another speaker in the car, but developing a proper speaker that can reproduce the sound as we want. The basics; go back to the basics. That’s missing a lot today.
TechRadar: You talked earlier about working with speaker partners on developing the right speaker for this situation. How involved do you expect to be in like the actual driver design?
Ajan Hannemann: We want to dive into this topic, and we will specify this — we actually already did in the past as well, for Mercedes Group. So we aim to improve those elements, but [the] really important thing for us, like Robert already mentioned, is the packaging of where the speaker is placed — there’s room for improvement if you can make it clear to the manufacturer of the car what kind of benefits we get when when we place the speakers in more optimized positions. You can gain a lot of improvement regarding the sound performance.
TechRadar: Can you give us any examples of issues that you see with a lot of in-car systems now that you want to aim to improve?
Robert Schletze: Definitely the design wins over the functionality, which is quite normal today and that shouldn’t be the case. So most of the time you have a midspeaker next to your knee, so you don’t have a proper staging. It belongs higher up. It’s all because the designers have the power.
TechRadar: So you want to work with partners where you can put the acoustic design earlier into the overall car design, and get the speakers where you need them to be. Is that the idea?
Robert Schletze: That should be the target, yeah. To be in early from the beginning stage of every project.
TechRadar: And the partners you’re working with now are on board with that?
Robert Schletze: They are on board and they provide the direct access, yes.
TechRadar: Can you say any of the car partners you’ll be working with at this point?
Aslan Khabliev: Let’s put it this way, they will be German.
TechRadar: What’s your goal in the luxury property development market? Are you are you looking at home theater installations, or is it more like convenient built-in sound for kitchens and bathrooms?
Alexander Meisen: Yeah, we’re focusing on to B2B [business to business] partnerships, so we’re not looking at individual home cinema here. We’re more looking to work with developers, architects, interior designers, etc. We’re also looking at concepts that we can scale, so not only the one unit, but maybe the whole building. Our main priority is clearly not the bathroom or the ambient sound in the elevator or somewhere, but clearly defined listening situations.
Ajan Hannemann: And here also, the target is to achieve a high-quality sound reproduction from those systems integrated in the environment, that are part of the architecture. From the very first steps, we [want to] define not only materials surrounding our system, but only also the perfect positioning of the system to make the best out of those sometimes-challenging spaces. New architecture is often with a lot of flat surfaces, so you get flatter echoes, you get high reverberation times, and we want to specify exactly the parameters we need to achieve a high-quality sound.
So that’s why, in the past, we worked at early stages together with the architects and the engineering and simulation companies to try to achieve the best possible room acoustic parameters. So this is the goal in architectural audio as well, not only home cinema. So this we want to do this in a scaled way, [multiple apartments] in one building. And we will individually tune every apartment, so that you get the transporting sound signature from the car, [bringing] the tuning expertise we have there into real-estate projects.
TechRadar: The yacht market is an interesting one because it seems to have its own genre of audio brands that specialize in, it like JL Audio from Garmin. So what kind of systems are you talking about building in that market and what do you want to do differently?
Ajan Hannemann: In that market, we have to rely on marine partners, because in the portfolio from Cabasse and Loewe there are no marine-certified systems available. So we have to choose strong partners in that market and adapt our skills, our expertise, the human touch we bring regarding sound signature, into the marine sector.
TechRadar: So in that area, are you talking about becoming more like an integrator and not so much offering your own speakers?
Aslan Khabliev: Never say never. This might be the next project for the guys from Cabasse, for example. By the way, you asked a question about drivers: we have our own drivers in Cabasse, with a lot of expertise and IP and patents. I’m very happy that we have acquired Cabasse, I think we bought a real diamond. So there is no project which we cannot do, let’s put it this way.
Right now, [Loewe Systems] is only a three-man show. It’s a very tiny team, but we have a lot of ambition and knowledge, and it’s never going to happen with these three guys by them by themselves. We [Loewe] are a big team now, we have 200 people now in Kronach, and we have 40 people in France, and we all want to help these guys to become successful. So whenever they need some hardware, software, this can all be done in-house.
What we need to do to help them is to basically realize their dreams. And those things which were not possible in their previous experience, to make them possible with our skilled people — and in my opinion, there is nothing that is impossible. It has to make sense financially, because you don’t want to spend millions on one project and just sell one or two pieces. It has to make sense, but otherwise I think everything is possible. We’ve got the right resources for that.
Alexander Meisen: It’s amazing for us to see what kind of resources, expertise and and infrastructure we can access now as a team. All three of us are coming from Burmester. So Ajan responsible for overall acoustics at Burmester, Robert was the lead engineer for automotive and responsible for Mercedes. This is well known in the industry and this is also what we’re adding here. So a full network but with all the power and direct access within the Loewe group — this makes us really confident.
TechRadar: One of the areas mentioned in the press release was premium mobility brands. Can you say what that means outside of the areas we’ve already talked about.
Alexander Meisen: Yeah, so we would also call it, like, future mobility concepts. Automotive is is very clear, yacht is very clear, and residential as well. But for instance think about an RV. This is also interesting for us, but it’s not the main priority.
TechRadar: Things like tour buses for for bands?
Alexander Meisen: Exactly. But most of the time these are not projects you’re allowed to communicate [to other people] in the first place.
TechRadar: A lot of the times they might be private custom designs?
Alexander Meisen: They prefer that, yes. Same for yachts, but it’s still it’s very interesting for us.
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