MATTER

About Us

MATTER Loudspeakers - Design the unconventional - Materialise the emotion

Fanis Lagkadinos, the creator of MATTER Loudspeakers, is guiding us through the details:

OUR BACKGROUND - THE YPSILON ERA

"Demetris Backlavas and I have known each other since the eighties', as university students. Demetris was studying electronics and I was studying civil engineering (NTUA). Demetris was already a skilled analog designer focused on amplifiers. I was a DIYer, building amplifiers and speakers. Hi-Fi, our mutual hobby, brought us together as friends.

We have both been working as sound engineers for several years, gaining experience from large scale musical projects (like live concerts in halls or stadiums, music clubs' sound set-ups, theatrical plays etc.)

We decided to partner in order to make a business out of our common passion into founding "Ypsilon Electronics", a workshop to manufacture Hi-Fi sound equipment (an integrated amplifier and some power amplifiers for professional use). At the same time, we were making custom ordered loudspeakers.

In 2005 we presented the first Ypsilon High End product, the "SET100" amplifier, Ypsilon is now celebrating its birthday! Meanwhile, we developed our own ribbon tweeter and loudspeakers for Ypsilon purposes (shows or electronics evaluation). One of these loudspeakers had performed in the Heathrow High End show for the first "SET100" international presentation. This speaker remains the standard for developing the entire Ypsilon Electronics series of products.

We have been screening every high frequency compression driver and Hi-Fi tweeter available at the time. The newly produced powerful yet affordable Neodymium magnets could allow high intensity magnetic fields in a wide magnetic gap. Therefore we oversaw the potential to make a wide-range ribbon tweeter instead of super-tweeters (extreme high frequency tweeters) like Raven's, which was at the time the only use for ribbon tweeters.

To our opinion, none of the commercial tweeters didn't meet our high standards. We were convinced that building a true ribbon tweeter could overcome every shortcoming of the typical electrodynamic drivers. Our ribbon tweeter's outcome confirmed our choice.

The expansion of our R&D knowledge in designing and manufacturing audio frequency transformers pushed the improvement of the ribbon tweeter to the limit. This tweeter was implemented in custom loudspeakers. One of the Ypsilon loudspeakers, "Erato LS-100", was used for the premiere of the integrated "Phaethon" amplifier in the 2014 Munich High End show.

Nonetheless, we never decided to launch an "Ypsilon Electronics" series of speakers. My Ypsilon field of expertise was to build the transformers used inside the devices, while Demetris is Ypsilon's chief engineer."

THE BREAKING POINT - FOUNDING MATTER LOUDSPEAKERS

"I always felt the need to further explore the potential for building and commercialising a High End loudspeaker. Together with my life partner Evgenia Panagiotopoulou, we created the brand "MATTER", a new firm to build High End loudspeakers. We share the same passion for live music, we met when I was working as a sound engineer.

Evgenia is a High Energy physicist (with phd studies in the ATLAS/CERN experiment), while being a singer, therefore is a well trained listener and a connaisseur of physical processes. We share the same passion for music. Obviously, the naming "MATTER" and "Anti-MATTER", the logo (a waveparticle visualisation) were inspired by her science expertise.

My initial intention was to design a 3-way cabin loudspeaker, originated from the Ypsilon's "Erato" speaker. I decided to explore the potential to actualise a loudspeaker avoiding the cabin's constrains and high cost. After all, the speakers' designers had already depleted every possible improvement in designing box speakers, using many notable solutions regarding the cabin's coloration and the absorption of the radiation emitted within the cabin. One of the finest box designs, that of B&W's "Nautilus" is a good example. However, there is no "black hole" in a cabin to "swallow", "digest" and transform the total radiation energy into heat. Part of this energy is always reflected back to the lightweight membrane of the drive unit's dome.

After a year of R&D and testing, I knew for a fact that I was able to build a real alternative, much different than the box speakers, lighter, relatively compact, yet of high quality and equally efficient. My alternative is an electrodynamic 3-way loudspeaker, following the open baffle principle."