Celestion MD Nigel Wood on a Century Of Innovation: “Celestion stayed true to its core identity”

For 100 years, the Celestion name has been synonymous with unparalleled sound quality and technological innovation. From its iconic guitar speakers that laid the bedrock for the sound of British rock and roll alongside artists like The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, to its pioneering advancements in PA transducers, the company’s journey has been marked by a relentless pursuit of audio excellence. As Celestion embarks on its centennial year of celebration, managing director Nigel Wood sheds light on the profound evolution that has shaped the company’s legacy and the pivotal role it has played in shaping the sound of generations of music.

What has most influenced Celestion's evolution over the past century?

What's really interesting about Celestion is, we started making loudspeakers 100 years ago, and all this time later, we're still doing that, still making loudspeakers. A lot of companies are 100 years old, but during that period, they've evolved into different industries or to do different things. But Celestion is unique. It’s stayed true to its core identity.

How did the birth of the electric guitar inform Celestion's path?

It's certainly shaped it in the past 65 years. It really started with Vox and Marshall amps: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and all the heavy rock and roll players that came after. That set the direction through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s to today, and that was very important to us. Over recent years, professional pro audio and sound reinforcement have become as important to us as guitar amplification. The electric guitar was an important part of our history, but it is not the whole story.

How did business evolve as you narrowed your focus from finished products to transducers?

It totally transformed. When I took over 20 years ago, Celestion was making transducers and making finished-goods products. It was trying to do everything. And in business, if you try to do everything, you tend to fail, so you should always do what you're best at. We realised that actually, there are a lot of people making speaker cabinets. It's really competitive. 

But there aren’t that many people making transducers. We thought, "There's probably more growth to be had making transducers," so we decided to ease out of boxes to focus on transducers, and that was the start of the modern transformation of the company.

Celestion has made deep investments in R&D technologies. How have those investments influenced product design?

Making prototypes of mechanical products – and a speaker is a mechanical product – is very time-consuming. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources. We realised that instead of making physical products or physical samples, if we can model our products in the digital world, we can be more efficient. 

We started developing our software tools 15 or more years ago, and every year we've improved them, and it's made the process much more efficient. Now we can talk to customers and say, "What is your application? We can give you a design in 10 minutes."

We talk about loudspeaker design being a science but also having a bit of art to it. Does that apply to transducers as well?

Oh, without a doubt. A guitar speaker is probably 80% art. Guitar speakers, while we measure them, we spend more time listening to them, because a lot of a player’s tone will come from a guitar speaker. With pro PA speakers, it is totally different. We have to re-create the signal exactly to the customer’s requirements. There's a lot more science there. 

But at the end of the day, people listen to our products, so we have to listen to them as well. Of course there's always a bit of, “the results tell us this, but listening, it's not quite right, so let's tweak it.” The software will get you so far, but the last couple of percent, we still have to listen to the product.

With all of Celestion’s technology investments, do you feel like it's easier to design a good speaker today?

Yes, it's easier, but the other side of the coin is the expectations are more demanding, so it tends to balance out. Actually, we prefer demanding customers because demanding customers are looking for performance, and we always do best with customers who want great performance.

Why have compression drivers been so successful for Celestion?

Fundamentally, making compression drivers is really, really difficult. But we like to say difficulty is our friend because if it's difficult for us, it's difficult for our competitors. If we can come up with a formula to make them consistent and reliable, and cost-effective, we're likely to be successful.

How would you characterise a company that's able to design both the Greenback and the Axi2050 compression driver?

Celestion is unique in that it does make both guitar speakers and PA speakers, and the way we approach the design is different for each. But because we have the legacy of making guitar speakers for many years, we know what the secret sauce is, and it's vastly different from PA speakers. 

That secret sauce we keep to ourselves. At the same time, we have research engineers whose job it is to innovate – to think about future technologies for sound reinforcement and then a team of very skilled engineers who know how to turn those concepts into actual PA products.

What led Celestion to get into software products? Were impulse responses a natural extension?

If you think of guitar speakers, what do we actually offer? We actually sell different tones and we can build them with a range of different sounds. If you compare it to ice cream, some people like chocolate, some people like strawberry, some people like vanilla. Well, they're all right, and they're all wrong. It's like, we're here to make your favourite ice cream, pick the flavour you like!

As the world has gotten more digital, more quickly, we thought, "Okay, well that's the market trend” If the market's looking for digital tone instead of analog tone, we just have a responsibility to make that available. And that’s the point; if you think about it in terms of tone instead of a physical speaker then Celestion digital products make perfect sense. 

So if you want tone from an analogue product, then the traditional, physical speaker is what you get. If you’re into digital tone, then it makes sense for us to offer a downloadable option, too. They have all these different flavours, and different musical styles require a different flavour. We've been very successful creating new flavours and now we’re just delivering them in a new way.

What comes to mind when people say that Celestion is the voice of rock and roll?

Celestion was there at the birth of rock and roll. If you look at the classic albums of the sixties, maybe 90% of them used Celestion speakers somewhere in the mix. Even today, when you listen to the radio the proportion is probably the same: 90% of the guitar sounds are through a Celestion speaker (whether analog or digital). It’s quite a legacy.

Not only has Celestion helped shape the sound of British rock and roll, you've even been visited by the Royal Family. How would you characterise Britain's role in Celestion's identity?

When people think of Celestion, they think “British,” and they think of England; after all, it’s woven into our heritage. And of course, British rock ‘n’ roll is famous across the world. All of our products are designed in the UK and a majority of our premium guitar products are made in the UK. Additionally, an increasing amount of our premium PA product is made here, too, because that's what the market expects. That Britishness is very important to us.

So many notable artists are associated with Celestion. Are there any that stand out for you for any unique reason, or that you have special relationships with?

The list of notable artists is so extensive that it is hard to choose. During the past several decades, hundreds of the most famous songs and albums in the world have been created using Celestion speakers. The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Queen, Van Halen, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses — the list goes on and on. 

This year, for our 100th anniversary, we have produced a book, A Century of Sound: The Story of Celestion, which I hope will be of interest to Celestion fans and anyone interested in the history of audio. The foreword was written by Brian May of Queen, who has been a Celestion artist for many years and is one of my personal favourites.

How would you describe the culture at Celestion?

From a business point of view I would say that our culture at Celestion is both customer- and product-oriented. It's engineering led, because ultimately the loudspeakers we design and the customers we design for are very technical. But to an extent it is also sales and marketing led, because building a strong relationship with our customers is similarly vital.

Employees often stay at Celestion for decades. To what do you attribute that dedication?

There is also a sense that Celestion is a big family. Our longest-serving employee is Dee Potter. She left school at 15 on a Friday and started at Celestion working for her mom on the following Monday, on a production line, and she’s stayed ever since. In 2024, she’ll have been with us for 50 years. 

What we find when we take on employees around here is they either leave fairly quickly, or they stay for 20-odd years. They either fit that culture and they want to work with us, or they don't quite fit, and they leave. I've been here 20 years and I'm still one of the new boys.

Some interesting items have come off your production lines over the decades, from toy ducks to ladies’ lingerie….

Lingerie is like, yeah, where did that come from? In one of our acquisitions, they put a garment manufacturer together with Celestion — at the time it was described as “intimate apparel”. During the ’40s, apparently, we also made cigarette lighters and cuckoo clocks! Here's an interesting fact that probably many people don't realise: Celestion probably has the world's biggest musician endorsee program. 

In part because we're at the heart of so many other brands’ products.. With all of our guitar amp customers, all their players are naturally Celestion players, too. From that often comes a genuine endorsement and we’re thankful for that.

Celestion has been around for 10 decades and survived a war; what's behind the company's longevity?

Over the past 100 years, signal processing has changed dramatically since the days of those really old radios with low output and, by today’s standards, poor-quality sound. But at the end of the day, that signal still needed a transducer, and still needs it today. The technology has changed a lot, expectations have changed a lot, but there's still demand for converting electrical energy into sound pressure. 

And in 100 years, that demand has remained. To survive in any industry, you have to innovate. You can't stand still. As the market moves forward or in different directions, you need to understand where the market is going and adapt accordingly.

What foundations is the company putting in place to ensure it thrives another 100 years?

Every year we invest more and more in software tools, and from the software tools, we can make more innovative products. We know that by having these innovations in place, they all won’t be successful – because they never are – but even just two or three will make a big difference. That’s one of the key foundations today, and it will continue to be one of the key foundations of our success over the next 100 years.

2024 is a big year for Celestion. How is the company planning to celebrate?

It all starts off at the 2024 NAMM show in Anaheim in late January. We’re having a VIP celebration party for our key customers, as well as our usual Friday night hoedown at the Ranch saloon. We’ve also gone all out on the booth design, gone all out on the Britishness (including a London bus) and had a bit of fun. There’ll also be more celebrations during the year, including another party back in the U.K, in our home town of Ipswich.

How about anniversary-edition products?

We are developing a guitar speaker that’s heavily based on some of the original alnico G12s from the late ’50s and early ’60s, recreating the tone and the look of those very early guitar speakers that we developed 60-plus years ago. We'll be showcasing that this year: it's called the Celestion 100. We’ll also have some custom, limited-edition, 100th anniversary-themed guitars built by our friends at Fender, Gibson, and PRS.

Celestion has been owned by tech giant Gold Peak Technology Group for more than 30 years. How has that partnership shaped the company’s successes?

Gold Peak Technology Group has always supported the business, strategically and through continued investment. A lot of companies get sold every five years, and it doesn’t give those companies stability. You can see when a company is about to be sold because they downsize and lay off employees, get short-term profit up, they get a new buyer in, and then it takes them three years to recover. Having a stable owner is very, very important – it frees us up to think about innovation and growth in the long term.

You've been at Celestion for two decades. What would you say that person in 2003 would be most surprised to learn about Celestion today?

Maybe the biggest surprise is how far we've come forward in technology. If I look back at 20 years, the design tools we had were comparatively Fred Flintstone-like. Now, it's better quality, we get better results, we get better predictability. The products we make today are much more technology-based compared to 20 years ago. 

The Celestion empire back 20 years ago was mostly Greenbacks and Vintage 30s. We had relatively few PA products, really, as we were at the beginning of our journey into that market segment. But back then we realised the guitar speaker market is quite niche and very mature so it's not likely to grow too much more.

So, to grow the business, we entered another category, which was PA transducers. To be successful in that category we had to offer an added value. We decided that the value would be technology.