In Focus Pitt & Giblin

“The feel comes from the care and attention to detail we put into every design and every piece of finished product.”

Founders Jack Pitt and Ross Giblin lean on 16 years of research and development to design and craft their speakers, and every product the pair create is made by hand in Tasmania. “Tasmania has honed our brand in more ways than we would care to admit,” says Giblin. “The lifestyle here has allowed us to deep dive into this project and spend tens of thousands of hours figuring it out. The feel comes from the care and attention to detail we put into every design and every piece of finished product.”

A traditional design vernacular informs the speakers’ appearance: the cabinets are typically crafted from timber veneers – including Tasmanian blackwood and American oak – in a range of stain and colour combinations. But what lies within the cabinet is at the cutting edge of acoustic technology: the speakers don’t require large amplifier racks or an abundance of cables to work. Instead, users can just plug in and play, relying on Pitt & Giblin’s digital amplifiers and the optimisation benefits of digital signal processing to offer high power, low distortion and a precise interplay of sound. A focus on audio balance and the consistency of sound spread throughout a room means that the speakers – which come in pairs, with the exception of the Cast model – work with all musical genres.

“The dynamics are pointed – the speakers build an image across the stereo centre like nothing else. And the bass performance is extremely addictive.”

“It sounds like it’s meant to: enjoyable, interesting, enveloping, good,” says Giblin. “The dynamics are pointed – the speakers build an image across the stereo centre like nothing else straight out of the box. And the bass performance is extremely addictive. No sub required.”

The brand’s latest release is the Flare speaker, where the power it produces belies its diminutive size. Its circular waveguide is larger than the cabinet itself, meaning its sound qualities can be retained in a smaller package. By only partly integrating the waveguide into the cabinet, Pitt & Giblin was able to reserve internal space for sound technology and the 20-centimetre bass driver, cutting down on the speaker’s mass. “Internally, the design is a game of packaging, with a lot crammed into a small space,” says Giblin.

“It’s been very important that we retain the sense of theatre that a large speaker inherently provides when we distil the design into something for smaller spaces.”

Flare sits at the opposite end of the size spectrum to Pitt & Giblin’s first product, the Superwax, a large-scale speaker that makes an equally large-scale statement. “It’s been very important for Jack and me that we retain the sense of theatre that a large speaker inherently provides when we distil the design into something for smaller spaces. Flare is a big speaker made small.”

Giblin says he and Pitt didn’t set out to fill a specific niche – rather, they aimed to make something “technically brilliant and also unique … but primarily something we could genuinely call our own.” Over years of experimentation, development and improving its technologies, the company has found its place as a maker of singular speakers, bringing a small-batch, handmade approach to audio design. View the range at Pitt & Giblin’s showroom and listening space, Ours, in Hobart.