Klaus Heinz and Oskar Heil’s first meeting took place in the 1980s. It is a moment that Klaus Heinz remembers vividly:

“It was back in 1985 when I got to know the Air Motion Transformer and its inventor Oskar Heil. I was intrigued by the idea and the sonic results of Heil`s ESS loudspeakers, which used the Air Motion Transformer in a rather quirky way and definitely included some questionable details. And yet, the accurate and brilliant sound removed a heavy curtain from all the recordings I liked and had previously listened to in what I had until then considered a rather decent quality. I was curious enough to visit Heil in his home in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, an area known as the Silicon Valley. I listened to his life story, we discussed electrons (his favorite „animals“) and, of course, loudspeakers. I was very impressed when granted the chance to visit his laboratory in Belmont. Here, I found myself in the most disorderly, chaotic room I had ever been in, and yet Heil definitively knew where to find what. He showed me quite a number of new transducer approaches that were different from the boring voice coil / piston-like diaphragm combinations that we were, at the time, familiar with, be it in the form of cones or domes.”

Klaus Heinz recalls how Heil presented some of his highly original and often quirky inventions to him – and how fascinated he was by the physicist’s imaginary reservoirs:

“What fascinated me most when discussing loudspeakers with him was the fact that he really thought originally. He constantly looked for new ways to create sound out of alternating current. He did not first ask which voice coil parameter or which resonance frequency would play what role, as a typical engineer in the Research & Development community would have done, but rather focused on the physical interdependencies between current and force in magnetic or electrical fields. Heil also constantly thought about ways to develop a better flaming ionic tweeter than Alan Hill’s Plasma driver, a fascinating device that excited air molecules electrically in order to reproduce frequencies between around 700hz and the ultrasonic range. While Hill’s invention was probably great for listening to single songs, a Mahler Symphony would probably have caused lethal lung cancer or similar illnesses with all the ozone produced by the music.”

During one of their first meetings, Oskar Heil surprised Klaus Heinz by telling him that it had actually been him who invented the dome back in the 1930s.

“How was that possible? From everything I knew, Wolfgang Seikritt invented domes in the 1960s, and in Germany. Yet here was Oskar Heil who led me through the almost absurd process of his invention: “What I did,” he explained, “was that I took my mother’s silk stockings, then added a darning mushroom, drew the stocking over the mushroom, applied egg white as a thin coating, let it dry out, glued it to a voice coil – and there it was: the first dome tweeter made of wood, stockings, and eggs.”

Although quite a few other audio-related inventions can be traced back to Heil’s ideas (such as the ‘traveling tube,’ the so-called ‘Wanderfeldröhre,’ which sensationally allowed to amplify frequencies up to above 1 GHz), Klaus Heinz’ favorite discovery in Heil’s lab was the Air Motion Transformer, which should later become the signature design of the many loudspeakers that Heinz developed from the 1990s onwards and that he remains dedicated to until this very day.