With a rich legacy spanning 10 decades, Celestion has made countless breakthroughs in loudspeaker technology and is synonymous with innovating the modern guitar speaker, capturing the hearts of generations of players with products that strike an ideal balance between power and tonal richness. Throughout the years, the company has set benchmarks in hi-fi, sound reinforcement and instrument amplification speakers, never losing sight of its focus on innovation and acoustic excellence. That’s why many of today’s most iconic amplifier and PA system manufacturers feature Celestion speakers at their core. Headliner takes a look back at 100 years of acoustic innovation…
1920s
Celestion’s story begins in 1924, when former gramophone maker Cyril French, along with his three brothers, founded the Electrical Manufacturing and Plating Company in Hampton Wick on the outskirts of London.
French was approached by Eric Mackintosh for help improving his invention, one of the earliest cone loudspeakers. The pair applied for a patent in 1924 for their revolutionary bamboo-reinforced, moving-armature “free-vibrating edge” speaker, which gave birth to a product named The Celestion.
The following year they earned a second patent for an improved “clamped-edge” design, ultimately enabling the company to develop a whole range of even better-performing radiogram loudspeakers of differing sizes.
Radio was in its early days; the BBC was coming to life and everyone, everywhere wanted to experience the “modern marvel” of wireless. The Celestion loudspeaker, an ornate cabinet that doubled as furniture, sold for six pounds ten shillings and came in a choice of wood finishes. Marketed as “The Loud Speaker of Distinction,” it met the exploding demand, and business boomed.
Throughout the late 1920s Celestion saw considerable global expansion, and in 1928 the newly incorporated Celestion Ltd. debuted with the motto “The Very Soul of Music,” and now producing several models of loudspeaker and radiogram cabinets, moved to expanded facilities in Kingston-upon-Thames.
1930s
The 1930s brought opportunity and challenges to Celestion. As the Great Depression rippled across the globe, British industry suffered. In 1935 the worldwide recession hit Celestion hard, and the first boom came to a close.
French and Mackintosh both left Celestion in the early 1930s, with French returning to the Hampton Wick factory to oversee UK distribution.
At the same time, the market for speakers shifted from large standalone units to small speakers fitted inside the radios themselves.
By the early 1930s the company presented its first permanent-magnet moving-coil speaker, the PPM. Other innovations that decade included a “recording gramophone,” which came complete with a blank disk and cutting needles.
In the 1930s the British Rola Company, the English offshoot of the Rola Company of Cleveland, Ohio, was producing loudspeaker products in London. Celestion and Rola competed for both home and export business throughout the 1930s; Celestion would be purchased by Rola a decade later.
During World War 2, both Celestion and British Rola were restricted to manufacturing one loudspeaker, the utility “W” type. Celestion was also chosen by the Government Research Establishment (GRE) to bring its Proximity Fuse into production.
Essentially a miniature radar transmitter and receiver operated by a chemical battery, the fuse was capable of detonating an anti-aircraft shell when it came within lethal distance of its target.
1940s
After the war Celestion continued producing speakers for hi-fi, radio and TV systems, in addition to cinema systems and acoustic instruments for the British military. In 1946 the company was purchased by British Rola, and the two entities combined, becoming known as Rola Celestion. After the merger, production moved to the “Ferry Works” factory In Thames Ditton.
In 1949, Rola Celestion was bought by Truvox, a company based in North London specialising in Public Address loudspeakers and systems. Thus Rola Celestion its Public Address product portfolio while continuing to serve the radio and emerging TV market.
1950s
The 1950s were an era of audio innovation, a time that saw the advent of the stereophonic long-playing record and broadcast television. Half of the radios in the UK had a Rola Celestion branded speaker inside; Celestion now had 400 employees and was producing 30,000 speakers a week.
Around this time the company experimented with alternative product lines, including a moving-coil microphone and even a holiday production run of toy ducks.
But Celestion’s most significant innovation that decade came in response to a new demand for amplified guitar music. The iconic Vox AC30, designed to meet the growing need for louder amplifiers, required rugged, reliable loudspeakers.
The Celestion G12 speaker, with its alnico magnet, had been in production since it was developed by Rola in the 1930s. Its newest incarnation, the T530, had been modified for use in guitar amps and toughened to withstand the demands of modern instruments and playing techniques.
1960s
T530 would come to be known as the Alnico Blue, named for the distinctive hue of its finish. When combined with Vox’s high-volume tube amps, the speaker offered a uniquely warm and distinctive tone. By 1962 the newly formed Marshall Amplification had adopted the silver version of the toughened G12 guitar speaker using it with its very first JTM45 amplifiers.
It was the creamy tone produced by the combination of the Celestion speaker and these iconic amplifiers that became one of the defining characteristics of the British Beat Invasion of the 1960s.
In late 1964, Celestion began to manufacture ceramic-magnet speakers. Offering a more aggressive tone than their alnico counterparts, they would prove to be perfect for achieving the edgy, overdriven guitar sound that the emerging rock titans were demanding.
The following year, Jim Marshall adopted Celestion ceramic speakers, using the T1221, more commonly known as “Greenback” due to its green magnet cover, deploying them in the newly introduced and soon-to-be-iconic 4x12 cabinets.
As rock grew louder and audiences grew larger, amplifiers had to become more powerful. Celestion, in turn, produced the G12 speaker in a range of magnet sizes to meet the demands of stadium and festival stages. New powerhouse amplifiers, outfitted with Celestion speakers, shaped the sounds of the most iconic artists of the time, including Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
The 1960s were arguably the decade when Celestion truly hit its stride. The Truvox brand began to take a back seat as the company marketed a portfolio of industrial and public address products under the Celestion PA sub-brand. Products included re-entrant horn loudspeakers, high-efficiency mid/high-frequency pressure drive units (precursors to modern-day compression horn drivers), and column loudspeaker systems.
Demand for hi-fi systems surged throughout the 1960s, and Celestion responded by launching the Ditton speaker family. First the Ditton 10, with its innovative HF1300 tweeter, followed by the Ditton 15. Featuring one of the earliest commercial examples of an ABR (Auxiliary Bass Radiator), the Ditton 15 became the best-selling bookshelf speaker of its time.
In 1968 production began at a newly acquired factory on Foxhall Road, Ipswich and in 1970, parent company Truvox Engineering completed a reverse takeover of the publicly listed Weingarten Brothers clothing company to create Celestion Industries, as a way of injecting more capital into the business.
The company’s foray in the garment industry produced a few fringe benefits, such as Friday factory sales that offered employees discounted ladies’ clothing.
Celestion made inroads into sound reinforcement initially through its relationship with Watkins Electric Music (WEM) during the 1960s. WEM was famous for its “Wall of Sound” PA, which provided 1,000 watts of power for the 1967 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival, upgraded to 2,500 watts for The Who at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival. (Warning signs at the event demanded concertgoers stay at least 15 feet away from the system!)
A year later the Isle of Wight sound system featured a Celestion speaker in WEM’s groundbreaking parabolic dish system, which could send audio signals over a remarkably long distance.
1970s
As the Swinging Sixties gave way to the 1970s, developments in instrument amplification and a nascent sound reinforcement industry led Celestion to establish the Power Range, with various permutations of the G12 at the forefront, as the go-to “heavy duty cone loudspeaker” for high-power applications be that musical instrument or sound reinforcement.
Thanks to their adoption by most British amp makers — and Celestion’s enduring relationship with Marshall in particular — G12M and G12H speakers became synonymous with the sound of rock and roll for anyone seeking the “British tone.”
Legions of legendary players made Celestion part of their sound, including Brian May of Queen, Joe Perry and Brad Whitford of Aerosmith, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, Angus Young and Malcolm Young of AC/DC and Edward Van Halen.
The 1970s were a time of international expansion as Celestion formed subsidiaries in France, West Germany, and the United States. As production demands grew, the company expanded into a second assembly plant in Ipswich, dedicated to hi-fi.
When manufacture of the iconic Ditton 44 and 66s was moved from Thames Ditton, the facility was refurbished in 1976, expanding production capability. That October it was officially re-opened by Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret. The company changed its name to Celestion International in 1979 to reflect its global outlook.
1980s
In the 1980s Celestion’s investments in cutting-edge R&D technologies like laser doppler interferometry, led to significant breakthroughs in loudspeaker design, which saw the company emerge as a leader in hi-fi, music-making, and sound reinforcement speakers.
The groundbreaking SL6 with its unique copper dome tweeter launched in the early 1980s as the first of an extended family of audiophile speakers introduced that decade. Lauded for their sound quality; the series ensured the company remained at the forefront of home audio innovation.
The company also underscored its credentials as a mass-market hi-fi brand for the changing audio landscape of the late 1980s when it set a new standard for budget hi-fi loudspeakers with the launch of the Celestion 3 in 1989.
Introduced in 1986 to meet the demands of a new breed of hard rock player, the much-loved Vintage 30 speaker, capable of handling higher power and delivering overdrive, quickly became a favourite of artists and amp and cabinet manufacturers alike and remains an industry standard to this day.
It is captured on thousands of recordings by guitar legends like Slash, Steve Stevens, Steve Vai, and Peter Frampton. By the turn of the 21st century it had also become the go-to sound for heavy metal.
As disco peaked in the 1980s, nightclubs proliferated, demand for scalable PA systems grew, and in 1987 Celestion debuted the SR series, the company’s first serious inroads into portable sound-reinforcement systems.
With systems ranging in size from the stylish KR Series to the rugged Road series and powerful CXi Series, Celestion catered to every niche in the finished systems sound reinforcement market.
1990s
In 1992 Celestion International, along with another British loudspeaker company, KEF, united under the banner of Kinergetics Holdings, Ltd. whose major shareholder was Hong Kong’s Gold Peak. Ultimately the company evolved into GP Acoustics, with the companies both wholly owned by Gold Peak.
Celestion continued to make inroads in pro audio, thanks in large part to an infusion of resources from Gold Peak, which invested heavily in R&D and other resources throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.
This led to significant innovations in compression drivers as well as pioneering work with neodymium magnet technologies, ultimately becoming a catalyst for Celestion’s growth in the pro audio market.
Eventually, the company began to tilt more toward transducers and away from finished cabinet systems. Initially the focus was on guitar speakers for both OEM customer and retailers, moving high-volume manufacturing to Asia while preserving a “Designed in the UK” focus, with Celestion building marquee products in England.
More emphasis was also placed on sound-reinforcement transducers, with the development of low-frequency woofers and high-frequency compression drivers, again for both OEM customers and the retail market.
The shift in strategy coincided with a move to a brand-new purpose-designed factory on the outskirts of Ipswich, replacing the tired, old industrial environment of Foxhall Road with newer, smaller premises built to better facilitate research and development.
2000s
As the MI side of the business grew, the 2000s saw the launch of Celestion’s Partners in Tone guitar speaker endorsement campaign; today the program boasts a lineup of more than 200 artists and producers, including legends Eric Clapton, Brian May, Robben Ford, Tony Iommi, and Steve Vai.
Celestion continued to expand its portfolio of American guitar and PA clients throughout the 2000s.
It was a boom era for guitar gear; during this time Celestion debuted the Heritage Series, which paid homage to the 1960s sound. This was quickly followed by the Gold, a high-powered alnico speaker; the G12 EVH signature speaker for Edward van Halen; and later, the Creamback range of higher-powered range of vintage-sounding guitar speakers.
By 2006, under the leadership of Nigel Wood, the company finally exited its PA systems and consumer hi-fi businesses, turning its focus toward the design and manufacture of a broader and more comprehensive range of sound-reinforcement transducers alongside the established and successful guitar and bass speakers.
A streamlined focus on transducers brought major advances in compression driver technology, including the introduction of the patented deep-drawn diaphragm and maximum modal-suppression phase plug for ultra-low distortion HF performance.
Throughout the 2000s, the company collaborated with a growing roster of leading sound-reinforcement companies, developing innovative, often bespoke, pro audio transducers for a broad range of applications.
2010s
In 2016 Celestion debuted the Axi2050 “axiperiodic” compression driver, a revolutionary high-power, high-output transducer capable of reproducing an ultra-wide frequency range of 300 Hz to 20 kHz without the need for a mid-band crossover.
Reacting to the needs of the MI marketplace, the 2010s saw Celestion diving deep into digital technologies.
Digital modellers evolved from simple combo amps with built-in EQ and effects into sophisticated, standalone computing devices featuring sophisticated DSP, largely enabled by the impulse response (IR), a digitised “snapshot” of an acoustic space or a piece of equipment’s acoustic behaviour.
In 2017, Celestion launched CelestionPlus.com, offering Celestion guitar speaker and bass speaker tones as downloadable impulse responses.
2020s
Today, more than two-thirds of the company’s business is in this market segment: manufacturing low-frequency, high-frequency. and full-range PA products. Celestion is perhaps the largest branded manufacturer of compression drivers and one of the leading designers of coaxial speakers, making good on the company’s intention to become a force to be reckoned with in the pro audio world.
In 2020 the company introduced the SpeakerMix Pro plugin, which represented a major leap forward in guitar speaker tone emulation when used together with a new generation of impulse responses, Dynamic Speaker Responses, developed in-house.
The company’s newest UK-built guitar speaker, being produced in time for the company’s 100th anniversary celebrations in 2024, is a tribute to the silver alnico speakers of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
Named the 100, it is voiced to be as close as possible to the speakers that were the inspiration for the original G12 guitar speaker—but boasts a beefier power rating of 30 watts.
As Celestion continues to produce iconic speakers like the Alnico Blue, Greenback and Vintage 30 that have defined its heritage, it further expands into the PA market, focusing on new driver innovations.
Most recently this has included the Ten2 (Ten Squared, or TSQ) prestige range of precision low-frequency speakers, designed and manufactured in the UK and the first range to be built using Celestion’s newly commissioned, robotically assisted production line.
Much has changed within Celestion over the past 100 years. Ownership and leadership have transitioned, and markets have shifted. Yet, at its core, the company’s essence remains the same as it was when Eric Mackintosh and Cyril French pioneered one of the world's initial cone loudspeakers.
Through its unwavering pursuit of sonic perfection and relentless drive for innovation, Celestion has left an indelible imprint on the landscape of sound technology and solidified a legacy that resonates across generations of musicians and industry professionals alike.
In this podcast series, Headliner interviews Dire Straight's Hal Lindes, multi-Grammy Award winning songwriter, record producer and guitarist, Gordon Kennedy (Change The World), Aziz Abrahim, heavy metal producer and engineer Joe Barresi, Judas Priest's Andy Snead, guitarist/producer Jan Ozveren, guitarist and musical director, Chris Wrate and Nick Perri about their careers and relationship with Celestion guitar speakers.
