WILSON BENESCH - a brief history
The company is owned and directed by two directors:
Craig Milnes directs product development and design
Christina Milnes directs all aspects of sales, production and financial planning.
The Wilson Benesch bank account was opened in 1989. The account opened with £10,000 and a £15,000 overdraft. This would be consumed in the first year in a Research and development project part funded by the Department of Trade and Industry who contributed £25,000. The outcome? the world's first carbon fibre sub chassis turntable. This design incorporated numerous innovative design features and although it went out of production in 1995 due to the Papst motor being made obsolete it is still a sought after design holding its price on the second hand market.
The A.C.T. One tonearm was not the first carbon fibre tonearm in the world, but it was certainly the first to fully exploit the extraordinary engineering properties of Aerospace quality, carbon fibre. By placing the fibres in a helix, the Wilson Benesch solution delivers maximum torsional stiffness, as well as maximum damping of the cartridge induced structural borne vibration. Like the turntable the other innovative features remain unique today, including the world's first three point locating, Kinematic bearing and unique counterbalance arrangement. In retrospect, one can now see how the knowledge acquired during the Turntable sub chassis and subsequently the tonearm development, gave rise to a fundamental understanding of the how sonic borne energy effects the perception of sound. It was this work that would eventually lead to the world's first curved carbon fibre loudspeaker design that would be seen for the first time in May 1995 at the Frankfurt High End Show. Analogue remains today a format of prestige and one that Wilson Benesch is delighted to be strongly associated with. We continue to use analogue recordings to voice all our loudspeakers.
Remaining with the analogue development, at this time it should of course be remembered that C.D. was in the ascendancy. "Perfect Sound Forever" was being promoted and vinyl was being presented at every opportunity as the media of the past. England's press and the majority of its dealers were totally disinterested in analogue. _In Ken Kessler's review of the Wilson Benesch turntable he remarked that someone ought to send these guys a calendar! Today the predictions that we stated in 1980 have all come to pass as we predicted. Although the first turntable is no longer in production it is one of the few audio products in the world that can be seen to have appreciated in value. Second hand units now exchange hands for more than new units sold for!
For almost five years the domestic market was completely unaware of the small company in Yorkshire that was selling 99% of its product to some of the most respected distributors in the world. However in 1996 the analogue designs collected numerous awards including Best turntable from Gramophone and HiFi News. Germany's journal Stereoplay made the system reference, and in the influential Japanese journal Stereosound it won the accolade of "Best Buy"
The product that turned eventually even the heads of the British was the A.C.T. One Loudspeaker. This development project was also part funded by the D.T.I. It took less than a year to develop despite the high degree of collaboration involved in the research with numerous engineers from a wide variety of technologies including advanced composites engineering and acoustic design. It is now recognised throughout the world for being the first in a number of important design facets.
Including the first speaker to exploit a sloping top design to reduce room interactions.
The first to exploit a curved advanced composite structure based upon carbon fibre.
The first to exploit a solid metal baffle to mount the drive units effectively and enable subsequent upgrade.
Acoustically, the design placed a great deal of emphasis upon phase coherence, a design element that has been maintained in all subsequent products leading ultimately to the crossover free loudspeaker design that has been implemented in a number of later designs.
Although the design was quite out of step with every other product on the market at the time it is now seen by many as the forerunner of so many designs which we see today. Ten years after it remains today a small highly regarded design with a sonic excellence that still competes with contemporary designs. Its second hand value is excellent and by virtue of the metal baffle design can easily be updated as new driver technologies are introduced.
The critics endorsement of the A.C.T. Loudspeaker can be seen in the awards and Reference status that it established throughout the world. It became Reference in Germany and collected 6 other awards in other key markets in 1996 including two in Japan. Wilson Benesch was now in the loudspeaker business even though it had only one loudspeaker! The same year we applied for SMART funding to develop an advanced dynamic drive unit that would compliment the enclosure technology of the A.C.T. loudspeaker technology.
Export sales in subsequent years would continue to grow and dwarf that of the U.K. It would take another four years before the U.K. saw fit to bestow any awards for the loudspeaker. Ketan Bharadia of What Hi-Fi selected the A.C.T. Loudspeaker as Reference system in the year 2000. In fact What HiFi is the only magazine in the U.K. that has ever awarded the company any formal award.
Wilson Benesch invested in its first lathe in 1990 and has continued to invest in manufacturing technology ever since. In the field of carbon fibre these manufacturing techniques are of course quite unique and State of The Art. Manufacturing capabilities provide a degree of control that enable the highest quality standards to be achieved in manufacturing repeatedly. This investment in manufacturing is also quite different to the majority of other audio company's. It expands the design envelope and makes real innovation possible. It was a key facet of our first successful application to DTI for considerable funding under SMART. Our successful application committed us to a two year R&D project that would exceed £250,000. This investment realised the Tactic(r) drive unit (see white paper on this) and culminated in the Bishop system which fully exploits this technology with four Isobaric Tactic(r) systems. The Bishop defined a new direction of development that has been maintained until the present day. In 1999 it was made Reference system in Germany's Stereoplay. A two part review comprised of technology in the first month and listening tests in the second month set a precedent for the magazine. Each part benefited from four pages of detailed explanations. An unparalleled achievement for a company that had only been designing loudspeakers for six years!
Wilson Benesch started as an export company and today enjoys a strong presence in all key markets of the world. The British market is also a key market today and Wilson Benesch can arguably claim to be the leading High End loudspeaker brand in the U.K. The A.C.T. One Loudspeaker was replaced at What HiFi in 2003 by six Discovery loudspeakers used for both two channel and multi channel as the Reference. The A.C.T. One and A.C.T. Two loudspeaker was replaced in 2002 with the all metal / carbon fibre composite A.C.T. Loudspeaker. Japan awarded the design the Grand Prix 2002.
In 2005 the Smart feasibility Study into an innovative patent applied for infrasonic drive unit began. Torus has gone on to demonstrate once again the gulf that exists between Wilson Benesch design and every other loudspeaker design company in the world. It put in place the foundations for the companies development of accurate low frequency sound reproduction that would be described as "the most accurate woofer of all times" by the leading technical critic Holger Bierman of Stereoplay in Germany. In 2006 it would see the design described as a work of genius by Jonathon Valin where it was also seen fit to bestow the accolade of Product of the Year award by one of the most influential journals in the world The Absolute Sounds. 2005 also saw the company adopt a strap line. "The future is carbon" In the Torus, the company made further investment in order to take advantage of the potential of new carbon fibre technology, the diaphragm structure is quite unlike anything seen before using as it does molten PET to consolidate the fibre instead of epoxy resin. The carbon is woven exclusively for Wilson Benesch to achieve the complex curve with fibre direction naturally orientated exactly according to stress lines. The result is a structure capable of withstanding over 100,000 times its own mass. The future for carbon fibre composites is going to see further exciting opportunities that will enable Wilson Benesch to redefine what is possible in other designs.
Having redefined low frequency definition and fidelity the company turned its attentions to the opposite extreme. Retaining the soft dome tweeter that has stood the test of time against all new competing designs that have emerged the Scanspeak assembled Wilson Benesch tweeter works perfectly within its bandwidth. To go beyond the 20 kHz limitations would require a totally different device that was free of the mass limitations of the conventional dynamic coil based solution. Wilson Benesch has collaborated with Murata to deliver the ultimate solution Trinity. This remarkable design provides a snap shot of the potential of wide bandwidth sound that has been beyond engineering limitations until to date 2007. Like the A.C.T. one Wilson Benesch selected the German high End Show to present the full potential of Torus in combination with Trinity to deliver a wide bandwidth sound from 20Hz to 100 kHz.
2006 saw the introduction of the Square series a fresh approach once again to a the conventional wood based cabinet design. Seeing the cabinet as a soft material at the outset enabled unusual answers to be found to the problems of unwanted energy. The success of the design can be seen in the lowering of the noise floor attributable to cabinet colouration. By taking advantage of wall placement the design also provides the additional bass that enables a completely different set of design solutions for system building both in themselves or as part of more exotic options from the Odyssey Series. All three designs benefit from the High End drive units and crossover elements from the Odyssey Series. The designs have seen superb critical acclaim across the world including group test winner in What HiFi against the leading brands.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our colleagues and distributors that have helped Wilson Benesch grow its business and meet its development objectives. We would also like to recognise the importance of those journalists that have taken the time to evaluate and to accurately report on our products over the years. But most importantly we would like to thank all our customers, most especially those in the early years that recognised the merits in our design and enabled the company to realise its potential. By purchasing a Wilson Benesch design rather than one of the many other products, these people have invested in Wilson Benesch and enabled the company to do more research and development. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century Wilson Benesch continues to look ahead to bring something totally new to the market. To date we have collaborated with some of the finest scientists engineers and artists in the world to advance the art of loudspeaker and analogue design. If you share our passion for music, you will be inspired by the lengths that we go to, in order to make progress.