The corporate bio on Ralph Heinz states, “as the son of Renkus-Heinz founder and chairman, Harro… he was born to design loudspeakers.”
While his family has a history of being entrepreneurs, Heinz, now senior vice president, is quick to point out that there wasn’t an automatic route to the role he’d ultimately play when joining the company in 1989.
“But I do treat loudspeaker design and my role in product development and management with an entrepreneurial spirit,” he adds. “For me, it’s important to come up with products – after having polled the marketplace and interpreted users’ needs – that will truly solve their problems in a unique and novel way.”
Varied Interests
Growing up in Queens, NY, Heinz was aware that his father was involved with audio, and when the family moved to Chicago in the early 1970s as Harro took the role of president of Rauland-Borg, Heinz began working for his father part-time during high school, assembling loudspeaker cabinets. “I was already a closet audiophile,” he says, “but I never thought of that being anything but a summer job.”
When Harro moved the family to southern California in 1979 to start Renkus-Heinz, the son developed a greater interest in his father’s work. Targeting a career in mechanical engineering, after his first year of college, Heinz was again enlisted to help out at the fledgling company’s new shop.
Things still didn’t come together that time, either, with Heinz eventually departing to work with Sieger Engineering, a job shop south of San Francisco. Later he joined the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA as a machinist/CNC programmer/tool and dye maker, manufacturing components that would later end up being a part of space shuttle experiments. Married by now, he was also continuing his studies of engineering at San Jose State University.
“But my father wanted me, my wife at the time, and our son to live closer, so he said, ‘Come work for me and I’ll make sure you’re paid enough to continue school,’” he explains. “How can you turn down a deal like that? It worked well for a couple of years, but after I designed my first speaker and started going to trade shows, I no longer had time for the lab classes, which required my attendance.”
Thus in 1989, he rejoined Renkus-Heinz, this time as a mechanical engineer, handling the tooling for compression drivers. Another focus was implementing ways to reduce cycle times and waste while improving yield and performance through various manufacturing techniques.
Taking The Challenge
Partnership with users, clients and customers, and their education in the use of Renkus-Heinz products is core to the company’s philosophy, Heinz says in citing the impact of a critique of one of his first designs had on his future work. Shortly after re-joining the company, while attending Musikmesse in Frankfurt for the first time, he spoke with the R-H distributor from Japan who was looking for a loudspeaker that would compete with another manufacturer’s model. Upon his return, Heinz took up the issue with the chief design engineer.
“He replied, ‘Good luck with that. I just took a job at JBL.’” Heinz, says, laughing, something he does easily and often when discussing his path in becoming a driving force in the company’s development. “Because I was the son of the owner and founder,” he continues, “the last thing anyone in the company wanted was for me to step into the design role, but I thought I was probably the most prepared to take on the challenge.”
So he turned to noted loudspeaker designer D.B. (Don) Keele to discuss the distributor’s request. Keele had consulted for the company on a range of large-format horn designs, and Heinz had taken that opportunity to increase the use of CNC equipment for prototyping those horns. The result of their discussion led to the creation of the C2 loudspeaker, which included a 10-inch mid range horn and a co-axially mounted 2 by 1-inch manifold for high frequencies that Heinz felt would improve performance of the highs.
“It also had sort of a quasi-horn-loaded, bandpass arrangement for the dual 15-inch cones,” he adds. “It was a 3-way system, fully horn-loaded. We showed it around the company and they thought it looked interesting and sounded good, so I said, ‘Well, let’s give it a try.’”
After seeing and hearing the C2 – housed in a 3-feet-deep, 200-pound enclosure and sounding like a studio monitor during its demo at AES – system designer Craig Janssen (of Idibri) later told Heinz: ‘It’s interesting. It sounds really good. But here’s why I can’t specify it.’
“He explained to me that the horn-in-horn coax, while offering improvements over non-coincident designs, compromised the directivity of the high-frequency horn because it was very small, and would therefore reduce intelligibility in the big venues he was designing systems for,” Heinz says.
Getting into design, he continues, was therefore a bit of a trial by fire, but the critique, both in content and spirit, impacted his designs and design process going forward. In addition, his studies, albeit still incomplete at that point, informed his work enough that he was named the company’s principal designer in 1992. “Fortunately my background in mechanics has served me quite well, as it turns out that that it applies to designing loudspeaker enclosures, waveguides, rigging systems, and other key aspects,” he adds.