With the passing of Roger West, co-founder and guiding light of Sound Lab for over four decades, the audio community has lost a brilliant designer and innovator who spent much of his life perfecting full-range electrostatic loudspeakers.

As a teenager growing up in California, he credits the friendship of Dr. Ray Dolby, who happened to live a couple of houses away, with kindling his interest in high-end audio. Roger’s first speaker project was a corner horn housing a 15** JBL woofer. It was when he happened upon a pair of QUAD ESL-57s that “the vision of a more full-range electrostatic began to obsess me, and my future was defined.” After completing his graduate studies at Stanford University and working in the aerospace industry, he sought to return to his roots in Utah by finding a teaching position at a Utah university, He was eventually offered an academic position in the Engineering Department at Utah State University. But while funding for the university position was on extended hold, he was offered and accepted a temporary assignment at JansZen Electrostatic Speakers in Minnesota to help develop fresh speaker designs. He ended up spending the next seven years at Electronic Industries/JansZen designing a new line of hybrid speakers based on an advanced electrostatic panel with extension to 900Hz. His longtime friend, Dr. Dale Ream, strongly encouraged him to continue working on a full-range design, so he pitched the idea to the management of Electronic Industries. He was flatly turned down, as their focus from a marketing standpoint was strictly on small hybrid-type speakers. At that point, Dale suggested that they partner to form their own full-range electrostatic speaker company, and that lead to the formation of Sound Lab in 1978.

Sound Lab’s major design goal was a single full-range membrane transducer to preserve the phase relationship of all frequencies in the music being reproduced—in other words, perfect time-alignment. Another goal was to eliminate the use of an enclosure and its attendant boxy colorations. That led to a dipole radiator configuration. Roger discovered that a properly designed single-membrane, push-pull electrostatic panel that was tall enough to be considered a practical line source fulfilled all his design goals. The early years were challenging, especially after the unexpected passing of Dr. Ream in 1980. Many technical issues had to be solved. First and foremost was identifying materials that could withstand high voltages, reasonable abuse, and adverse environmental factors. Other issues concerned controlling corona discharge, finding an optimal low-mass conductive coating for the membranes, perfecting transformer design, ensuring structural integrity, increasing sound dispersion, and controlling diaphragm resonances. It’s clear in hindsight that perseverance was the main reason Sound Lab has continued in business for decades.