All
Zellaton
Website:https://www.zellaton.de/
Est. year: 1930
Zellaton is a Munich loudspeaker maker whose name comes from the foam-coated diaphragm that physicist Dr. Emil Podszus perfected in 1950 after about twenty years of work on speaker patents. Now run as ZELLATON GmbH by the third generation of the founding family, it builds a small range of hand-tuned floorstanding speakers in which every driver, including the tweeter, uses that multi-layer rigid-foam cone instead of a bought-in unit.
Range & what it's known for
Models are grouped in three series. The KLASSIK series covers Legacy, Stage, Reference Mk II and Statement, the EVO series includes the Plural Evo, and the ULTRA series is headed by the Statement Ultra. The Plural Evo is a 3-way design with a 30 mm tweeter, a 7-inch full-cone midrange and two 11-inch woofers, 92 dB sensitivity, 4 ohms and about 95 kg per cabinet. The defining trait is the three-layer hardfoam membrane, made by hand, which Zellaton runs full-range from 100 Hz to 8 kHz without crossover parts and also uses in a full-cone tweeter working beyond 40 kHz. Cabinets are multi-layer and finished in a polyester lacquer applied like piano paint.
Who owns it and where it's made
Podszus, who had studied under Max Planck and Walther Nernst, filed his first speaker patents in the early 1930s and began production in a basement with a modified dustbin as an oven, later moving west from East Germany. His son Kurt joined the business, and grandson Manuel Podszus, a mechanical engineer from TU Berlin, now develops the speakers and co-directs the company with Michael Schwab. Membranes are coated and tuned by hand in Germany over several weeks per driver.
The lineup in this catalog
Loudspeakers. Even the smallest Zellaton pair costs about EUR 20,000, and the top systems sell for well over EUR 300,000.
Who it's for
Zellaton builds for people setting up a dedicated listening room who are after floorstanders built around a family-owned driver technology rather than catalogue drivers and who accept long build times for hand-tuned drivers. Entry is through the KLASSIK models such as Legacy or Stage, the Plural Evo offers a more compact 3-way route, and the Reference Mk II, Statement and Statement Ultra form the upgrade ladder toward the largest systems.
Range & what it's known for
Models are grouped in three series. The KLASSIK series covers Legacy, Stage, Reference Mk II and Statement, the EVO series includes the Plural Evo, and the ULTRA series is headed by the Statement Ultra. The Plural Evo is a 3-way design with a 30 mm tweeter, a 7-inch full-cone midrange and two 11-inch woofers, 92 dB sensitivity, 4 ohms and about 95 kg per cabinet. The defining trait is the three-layer hardfoam membrane, made by hand, which Zellaton runs full-range from 100 Hz to 8 kHz without crossover parts and also uses in a full-cone tweeter working beyond 40 kHz. Cabinets are multi-layer and finished in a polyester lacquer applied like piano paint.
Who owns it and where it's made
Podszus, who had studied under Max Planck and Walther Nernst, filed his first speaker patents in the early 1930s and began production in a basement with a modified dustbin as an oven, later moving west from East Germany. His son Kurt joined the business, and grandson Manuel Podszus, a mechanical engineer from TU Berlin, now develops the speakers and co-directs the company with Michael Schwab. Membranes are coated and tuned by hand in Germany over several weeks per driver.
The lineup in this catalog
Loudspeakers. Even the smallest Zellaton pair costs about EUR 20,000, and the top systems sell for well over EUR 300,000.
Who it's for
Zellaton builds for people setting up a dedicated listening room who are after floorstanders built around a family-owned driver technology rather than catalogue drivers and who accept long build times for hand-tuned drivers. Entry is through the KLASSIK models such as Legacy or Stage, the Plural Evo offers a more compact 3-way route, and the Reference Mk II, Statement and Statement Ultra form the upgrade ladder toward the largest systems.
