Roy F. Cizek (January 29, 1943 – April 12, 1993)
The
speaker, manufactured in Newton,MA, is Roy's own - the most recent of a series
he designed, built and tested after many years of research and development. For
Roy Cizek is a perfectionist. A man in search for accurate reproduction of
sound.
He
first became interested in music when he started trumpet lessons at the age of
six. Combined with an aptitude for electronics which began at 13, Roy's life
became a double-track on music and electronics.
Majoring
in trumpet and piano with a physics minor at the University of Indiana, he
started to build speakers with his first :pro" speaker coming out during
his junior year.
By
1964, he had opened a hi-fi store in Bloomington, Indiana and, with the help of
an English physicist, developed a house brand. During this period, Roy's store
and sound room were rated among the best in the nation.
Developing
various systems between '65 and '74, Roy was admitted to MIT to study
electrical engineering, when the speaker absession hit once again.
":There's just always been this 'thing' about speakers, this need to
predict everything, to know a speaker intimately, and to get as close as
possible to totally clean and clear concert hall sound".
According
to Roy,"most engineers desgn the circuits for a speaker, build it, and
then compensate for its inadequacies after listening to it. My problem was that
I had been building a speaker, beginning to get the sound I was after, without
being able to measure it. I couldn't predict on paper and Ididn't know why I
was getting what I was getting."
In
april of '76, with a physics/mathematics associate, Roy began to finalize the
Cizek speaker. The two spent 80 hours a week going over the basic principles,
building, measuring, researching, writing, and working equations, time and
again.
And
on May 30, they finally had something. Friends at a leading loudspeaker company
proclaimed it "incredible", and several dealers took advance orders,
sound unheard.
Roy
claims that the success of the new Cizek speaker has evolved as a result of
follow through on very basic principles and theories. "In any speaker thet
utilizes a single woofer anda single tweeter, the key is the crossover network.
Most speaker do not produce flat response over the entire sound spectrum. There
are always exaggerations or depressions - distortion of some kind, somewhere
- but uniformly the trouble spot is the
crossover network, the point where the woofer and tweeter join. That's the
problem we finally solved."
1976
Cizek Audio Systems