STEREO SPEAKERS
If Oscar seems like a strange name for a pair of loudspeakers, it’ll make more sense once you know that all the speakers built by Swedish company Marten are named after jazz musicians — with series named after Coltrane, Parker and Mingus. This model is in honour of Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. (Though in fact only his mother called him Oscar; he was ‘O.P.’ to his friends.)
Marten names its speakers in this way because the three brothers who own the company, Jorgen, Leif and Lars, are all musicians, (drums, bass guitar and composer, respectively) and all are jazz enthusiasts. In addition to making speakers, their factory in Gothenburg has a fully equipped recording studio and they regularly release recordings on CD, LP, and as digital downloads. Their surname isn’t Marten, though. It’s Olofsson. The company takes its name from Leif’s middle name.
Equipment
As for the ‘Duo’ in the title,speaker. A common thread through all Marten designs is the use of ceramic-coned (and domed) drivers, which it designs but has made for it either by German manufacturer Accuton or by Indonesian manufacturer SB Acoustics (a company owned by Sinar Baja Electric). In fact it was Leif’s discovery of the ceramic drivers made by Accuton that inspired him to create a company to build loudspeakers. Accuton developed its first ceramic driver (only two years prior to Leif founding Marten) as the end result of a research project trying to find a cone material that was very light, very stiff and had high internal damping, requirements which are mutually contradictory. And after using Accuton’s ceramic drivers in his designs for the first time, he realised that he was building better-sounding loudspeakers than were commercially available at the time (1998).
