LEWITT Audio are pushing microphone design forward, making it easier and more accessible than ever to capture great sounding audio across any budget.
We caught up with Roman Perschon, founder of LEWITT, and Patrick Peeters, head of Global Sales, about their commitment to innovation and their passion for creation.
The microphone industry on the whole features a lot of tried-and-true designs, though sometimes it can feel a bit stale, i.e. reissues of classic designs etc. but Lewitt is doing something to push the industry forward. Can you tell us a bit about LEWITT’s mission?
LEWITT was founded to push microphone design forward. The funny thing is that the designs that are now oftentimes being copied were all about pushing boundaries when they came out. We consciously revive this lost audio pioneering spirit with new designs and feature sets. We believe that great sound is for everyone and offer cutting-edge sound and specs at affordable prices. Something that was very difficult in the past but is now possible with modern manufacturing techniques.
You engage with artists and producers when doing R&D— why do you do this?
People are the core of LEWITT because technology is never its own end. Technology’s purpose is to enable a fantastic user experience, provide a better workflow and yield better results for the user. That is why cooperation with artists and producers is so important to us. They allow us to listen and learn what features and sound characteristics make sense in the real world.
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The last few years have seen Lewitt step into the audio interface market— why is this? Did you see a problem with the existing market? Or is this a result of talking to artists and producers?
When you start recording, using an audio interface is weirdly complicated, as you probably know from your personal experience. Audio interfaces have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to usability. LEWITT audio interfaces change that with features like “Autosetup”. Just let it know what you want to do, and it will dial in the proper settings for you. These seemingly “simple” things are not something that only beginners appreciate. We also get praise from Grammy Award winning producers when clever features make room and save time for the creative part of our work.
LEWITT truly is a global brand, while based in Vienna, you work very closely with your Chinese manufacturers and US teams. Why is this integration so important to you? Why do you work to dispel misconceptions about overseas manufacturing?
We want to offer the best price-to-performance ratio for LEWITT customers and make our products accessible to as many people as possible. Although we design and develop all our products in our HQ in Vienna, China has established supply chains that are unparalleled in the world. We don’t see benefits in shipping components produced in China around the globe and then putting them together somewhere else to gain a particular image that, in the end, does not reflect economic realities. In China, we have our own team that sets up production lines, measurement systems and quality procedures, to ensure all LEWITT products meet the highest standards, yet at affordable prices.
Our global sales partners confirm that LEWITT products have one of the lowest defect return rates from all of their suppliers.
Products like the LCT 640 TS really push recording and music production forward, allowing for polar pattern to be adjusted after the fact. Can you talk a bit about where the idea/need for this came from?
A multi-pattern microphone often serves as a “studio workhorse”. The idea of LCT 640 TS was to create a studio workhorse 2.0, something that brings even more flexibility to the studio. Its Dual Output Mode allows to change the polar pattern and, therefore, the frequency response during the mixing process or while doing the sound check. Something that has been proven extremely valuable to audio professionals working in the studio but also live. You can also use LCT 640 TS to create perfectly phase-aligned stereo recordings, again adding flexibility. Plus, any two LCT 640 TS form a stereo pair due to our Perfect Match Technology. You can add another LCT 640 TS to your locker as you go should you want to build more complex microphone setups at a later point and still get the performance of a matched pair.
While obviously interchangeable— what do you think makes for a good studio mic vs. a good live mic?
The LEWITT MTP W950 live microphone is there to make everyone happy – the engineer, the artist, and, of course, the audience. It makes the artist sound live like on the record by featuring a 1” true condenser studio capsule. To make this work on stage, our R&D team fine-tuned the pickup behavior until we achieved an industry-defining 90% rear rejection, resulting in crystal-clear live mixes, providing freedom for the engineer to create the sound needed for an impactful performance.
It’s the same with studio mics. They are good when they help you sound fantastic easily, meaning your takes will sit well in the mix. And they are good when they provide the high-end specs needed to make room for creativity.
Our recent PURE TUBE studio vocal microphone is a perfect example of this. People love the sound of tube microphones, but the classic designs are oftentimes noisy and, therefore, unsuitable for modern production techniques like heavy compression or vocal layering. If the noise levels are high, they add up. For PURE TUBE, we designed a new circuit from scratch with the lowest self-noise figures of any tube microphone on the market while delivering the depth and warmth that vocalists find inspiring.
Can you speak to any exciting ideas/technology/advances that you’re excited about?
Everyone needs a reliable acoustic environment to create professional mixes for music or video production, but not everybody has the possibility to work in such an environment. That’s why we developed Space Replicator, our first plugin. It allows for professional audio mixing, editing, and mastering, even without a studio. For this, we captured real spaces and turned them into virtual acoustic spaces with extremely high resolution. You can experience these spaces as if you were there using the headphone model you already have.
Space Replicator offers a great variety of professional mixing and mastering rooms. Ideal for anything from critical listening to extra-long mixing sessions, always with the natural stereo field of high-end speaker systems. This way, the in-head localization of headphones is transformed into an experience of sitting in front of a professional speaker system, which makes working with audio much easier. The plugin also allows you to check how your mixes translate where your audience will play it – on a smartphone in the living room, car, or the club.
This solution allows many people without access to an acoustically treated space to create mixes they can trust.
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