Martin Logan

MartinLogan's story begins in the late 1970s in Lawrence, Kansas, when Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland met at a high-end audio store Sanders managed. Despite very different backgrounds — Sanders in architecture and advertising, Sutherland in electrical engineering — the pair shared a deep passion for music and, they soon discovered, a mutual fascination with electrostatic loudspeaker technology, prized for its exceptional purity and clarity but notoriously difficult to build well.

Sanders had been tinkering with electrostatic transducer designs for over a decade, and together the pair assembled a research and development team to turn that work into a genuinely marketable product. Their breakthrough arrived at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show with the Monolith, the world's first practical hybrid electrostatic speaker — combining a curved electrostatic panel for mids and highs with a conventional dynamic woofer for bass, solving the fragility and limited bass extension that had held electrostatic speakers back for decades.

Now part of the PML Group alongside Paradigm and Anthem, MartinLogan continues to build flagship electrostatic and hybrid speakers, including the acclaimed CLX and Motion series, from its original home in Lawrence, Kansas — still chasing the same "ethereal soundstaging" that first captivated its two founders in a Kansas hi-fi shop.