Great Concert Halls

If you were to ask me to define a great concert hall in one word, it would be this: acoustics. Although many of the great concert halls are aesthetically beautiful, what makes them great is the sound. They are places where the best musicians transcend mediocrity to create the extraordinary.

Whether we are talking about the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Großer Musikvereinssaal in Vienna or Carnegie Hall in New York, they share similar acoustic characteristics. Amongst the most important are reverberation, clarity and warmth & brilliance, and these concepts are fundamentally inter-related. For example, excessive reverberation reduces clarity, and warmth and brilliance are determined by the ratio of low frequency reverberation to high frequency reverberation.

Your listening room is no different. If you really want to bring the concert into your listening space, then you cannot overlook the room acoustics.

Naturaural Acoustics

Naturaural Acoustics began as a Zanden Audio product. In 2008 Mr. Naraji Sakamoto approached Kazutoshi Yamada of Zanden Audio Systems, Ltd. with a unique damping material. You may not know Naraji Sakamoto, but you probably know the Panasonic and Technics brands. Technics is a division of Panasonic and is their specialty hi-fi audio brand.

So who exactly is Naraji Sakamoto? He was the head of Panasonic’s Audio Research Center for many years. The name Panasonic is actually derived from one of his early speaker designs. He also selected the name “Technics” to reflect the technical prowess of the brand.

Mr. Sakamoto personally led the development of many Panasonic and Technics products and spent a great deal of time designing speakers. This eventually led him to focus on damping materials to improve the sound of speakers. After many years of research Mr. Sakamoto developed a set of criteria to identify the ideal damping material. Then, in 2008 he approached Kazutoshi Yamada of Zanden Audio with a unique low repulsion viscoelastic polyurethane foam, commonly referred to as memory foam.

An Inspired Idea

It did not take long for Kazutoshi Yamada to realize that this new wonder material would be ideal for acoustically treating rooms. Some people will swear that you need to acoustically treat your room to achieve excellent results. Spending lots of money on expensive electronics without doing so is just a waste. Other people will tell you exactly the opposite. Acoustically treating your room is a waste and often the result is worse than when you started.

Both sides of the debate are correct to a certain extent. You cannot achieve excellent results without acoustically treating your room, but you need the right material. Most acoustic treatments are fundamentally flawed and use cheap materials, such as polyurethane foams, fiberglass or mineral wool. Naturaural Acoustics uses a composite viscoelastic polyurethane foam. Unlike other materials, it is dense and viscoelastic. Most importantly it conforms very closely to the characteristics of Naraji Sakamoto’s ideal damping material.

Industry Recognition

Although Zanden Audio is a small company specializing in high fidelity audio components, Kazutoshi Yamada’s work has not escaped the attention of Japanese industry. Zanden Audio had already been utilizing this amazing damping material for their own listening room, when Mitsubishi Electric engineers inquired about its use for an anechoic chamber. Eventually, Mitsubishi Electric awarded a contract to design the world’s first and only anechoic chamber to eschew rock wool and instead exclusively utilize this unique low repulsion polyurethane foam. To our knowledge it is the only anechoic chamber in the world to use a foam material exclusively.