Max Townshend, In Memoriam

Max Townshend, designer and owner of Townshend Audio, has died. He passed away on December 31, 2021, aged 78. For decades, he was an inventive and invigorating presence in audio in the UK, with worldwide influence. He took a pioneering interest in many ideas that became widespread in audio later on—and in some that did not but should have. These included exotic stylus shapes for phono cartridges in his moving-coil cartridge with parabolic stylus; metal drivers and ultra-rigid enclosures in his Glastonbury speakers in the 1980s; curved driver arrays for exact time alignment of drivers in his curved line-source speaker; heavy, inert platters for belt-driven turntables in his Rock Reference; the damping trough on the front end of the tonearm (originally suggested by Jack Dinsdale but brought to production by Townshend) in the Rock, Rock Reference, and later Mark Series turntables; cryogenic treatment and use of flat ribbons for characteristic impedance matching termination in his Isolda cables; vibration isolation for components (the Seismic Sink) and for speakers from the floor; super-tweeters for extending the ultra-top-end of speakers; and passive preamp designs, most recently the Allegri Reference. It is a remarkable list! And there would have been more: He worked intermittently on a cam-driven tonearm that would be pivoted but move its pivot point so its tracking error would always be zero. (This existed in prototype form—I heard a demo at a CES—but somehow never made it to market.) And he was interested in centering mechanisms for records, as well. There would have been much more to come had he lived on. (When I was writing this list, I kept thinking of more things he had done and having to go back and add to the list.) The company is continuing with firm intentions of carrying his unfinished projects to completion.

Max (he and I were friends, and I would find it hard not to call him by his first name) was a true enthusiast of audio, and his joy in the field was contagious. He believed in his views with real passion. He was a believer for example in ultra-wide bandwidth and was skeptical of digital for this reason. He once called an amp I played for him that had a top end roll-off not far from 20kHz “instant digital.” And he was a firm believer in vibration effects that one might have expected to be all but subliminal but turned out not to be.

But he was not just trying to sell his products. He once gleefully pointed out to me how much benefit one could get from just putting components up on Dunlop double-yellow-dot squash balls. I tried it—it actually worked.

Max was Australian (from Perth), and he never lost the accent nor the engaging and open personality one thinks of as characteristic of western Australians. British he was by adoption—he moved there in 1978—but he was far from fitting any traditional, stiff-upper-lip, stuffed-shirt British image. He was extraordinarily good company, engaging and full of kindness and generosity, a genuinely life-enhancing presence.

I and all his friends shall miss his inspiring presence in audio and the pleasure of his company.