Martin Audio Ltd’s Managing Director Dominic Harter on balancing heritage with hard decisions, and why sometimes saying ‘no’ is critical to long-term success

In professional audio, legacy is not a comfort. It is a responsibility. Few brands understand that weight quite like Martin Audio, a company whose sonic signature has travelled from the earliest days of touring reinforcement to some of the most demanding modern live and installed environments.

At the centre of its contemporary evolution stands Dominic Harter, a leader who, rather than rewriting the script, has chosen to refine it with precision, discipline, and a deep respect for what already works.

Harter’s journey to the top role has been anything but superficial. Having joined Martin Audio in 2015 and steadily rising through the ranks before being appointed Managing Director, his leadership is grounded in a rare duality: a firm grasp of commercial realities and an unwavering belief in the primacy of sound. As noted during his appointment, his mandate was clear: to build on Martin Audio’s formidable heritage while steering it into a future defined by smarter systems, broader accessibility, and deeper market relevance. Yet, what distinguishes his approach is not ambition alone, but restraint — the ability to prioritise, to say no, and to protect the essence of the brand even as it expands its horizons.

This philosophy has played out across a decade marked by both disruption and opportunity. From navigating ownership transitions and a global pandemic to accelerating innovation in software-driven optimisation and scalable system design, Harter has quietly reshaped Martin Audio into a more agile, more inclusive, and more globally attuned force. His reflections on the brand’s legacy, particularly its 50-year milestone, reveal a consistent thread: that technology must ultimately serve people, and that trust, once earned, must be relentlessly protected.

In this conversation with Entertainment Technology Asia, Harter speaks with clarity and conviction; on leadership, on engineering discipline, on the convergence of hardware and software, and on the shifting dynamics of markets such as APAC and the Middle East. What emerges is not just a portrait of a company in motion, but of a leader who understands that progress is not about chasing noise; but about delivering it, flawlessly, every single time.

ETA: Stepping into the role of Managing Director at Martin Audio meant inheriting a brand with a deeply respected legacy and a fiercely loyal user base. On a personal level, how have you aligned your own leadership philosophy with Martin Audio’s ethos—and what kind of organisational culture have you consciously tried to shape during your tenure?

HARTER: Stepping into a company like Martin Audio, you feel the weight of its history almost immediately. When I arrived, the brand’s reputation and the loyalty of its customers were very strong. Both of those things highlighted for me that the Martin Audio signature sound quality was the one line in the sand that had to be present in every product we developed. My instinct was never to try and reshape that.

In terms of the culture here at Martin Audio, it really is a company that wants to serve the professional audio community at every level. That reflects my own philosophy so I’ve always been aligned with its honest ambition.

Our goal is to Unite the Audience whether that’s for engineers putting on gigs at a grass roots level or at the biggest festival in terms of attendance and stature. We make products with the same dedication to audio quality, for series serving both premium excellence and genuine accessibility.

We pride ourselves that we are The Martin Audio family, and everyone within that, whether staff, distributors, or customers, are treated with the same level of honest respect.

ETA: Martin Audio has undergone a significant strategic evolution over the past few years—balancing its legacy in touring with a growing emphasis on installed sound and system integration. Looking back, what were the hardest strategic decisions you’ve had to make to reposition the company—and what did you have to consciously say no to in order to move forward?

HARTER: It’s ten years now since I joined and at that time the company had the very successful MLA and CDD series, and an equally strong reputation. The strategy was simply to build upon that strong foundation – and we were aggressive with it.

The long-term aim was to create a two-tier product offering: one for the everyday professional who needs good, honest value product, and another, more premium offering that combined greater levels of innovation and more features, to meet the exacting demands of top touring acts and landmark installations.

The hardest part of that is always the prioritisation. You can’t do everything at once, and the temptation – particularly in a company with as much engineering talent as Martin Audio – is to pursue every interesting idea simultaneously. Saying no to certain paths, or saying not yet, in order to protect focus and execution quality, is a very important discipline.

Rather than looking at ‘gaps’ we simply followed customer need as we saw it, and the success of this strategy ultimately strengthened Martin Audio’s ability to address more of the marketplace while protecting margins. Ultimately it also grew the business while prioritising our customer base.

ETA: Martin Audio appears to be pushing toward a more intelligent, software-driven approach to system design. Do you believe the future of loudspeaker systems will be defined less by hardware and more by predictive intelligence and control ecosystems? How exactly do you see this playing out?

HARTER: Since 2010, with MLA and then again with our Wavefront Precision series launch in 2017, we’ve demonstrated to the market that with sufficient DSP intelligence and predictive software, a loudspeaker array could be programmed to deliver precise, repeatable results in complex environments – as focused as a lighting rig.

And yes, our DISPLAY Optimisation software with its patented algorithm has changed what was possible for the engineer. With unique features such as Hard Avoid™, it leads the way for some of the world’s most prominent festivals and events where its relied upon to deliver the highest degree of SPL accuracy.

But as you’ll see from our Wavefront Precision upgrades this year, hardware and software updates go hand in hand. Whilst it’s very important that sound output can be predicted, hardware also needs to be not only excellent, but also adaptable for the user to get the best natural response from it. For this reason, we include rotatable horn drivers and actively enable flexible dispersion in our loudspeaker series.

ETA: When it comes to filling critical gaps between portable, install, and large-scale touring solutions — how do you identify these “white spaces” in the market, and how do you ensure new product categories don’t just fill gaps, but genuinely reshape user workflows?

HARTER: Martin Audio is a genuinely customer focused company and for us, product development is customer led. You look at where engineers are reaching for workarounds. With Wavefront Precision, there was a clear gap and rental companies and live events needed systems that were fast to rig and tune without sacrificing coverage predictability. They needed modular configurations that could suit theatres, mid-size arenas, and outdoor festivals without being a completely different system for each. Wavefront Precision addressed that directly, it became our fastest ever selling line array series.

WPS is another example. Other 8″ line arrays in the market had real deficiencies and we wanted to overcome those other compromises. Which is why WPS has more drivers than anything else, we believe, in its class, with spacing, waveguide, and crossover point engineered to deliver optimum HF performance with exemplary mid and high frequency pattern control, even at higher SPL.

At the other end of the scale the gap was equally visible. CDD Series, followed by ADORN, offer high-performance distributed sound in visually discreet enclosures, at an accessible price point. The common thread is always the customer’s workflow, not the gap in our catalogue. The gap in the catalogue is a symptom. The diagnosis comes from understanding where and why installers or engineers are compromising.

ETA: APAC and the Middle East are increasingly defining the global pace of growth in both live events and fixed installations. From your perspective, how do these regions differ in terms of system design philosophy, purchasing behaviour, and appetite for innovation — and how has Martin Audio adapted its approach to remain relevant across both?

HARTER: Both regions are moving at an extraordinary pace, but the character of that pace is quite different. The Middle East is defined by the sheer scale and ambition of what’s being built, with involved, multi-stakeholder decision-making processes. APAC is more heterogeneous and, I would argue, more demanding in a different way. But as we have found through the rest of the world, local presence that is genuinely embedded in the region has been a guiding principle for us.

We’ve discovered that our product design principles sit very well in these regions. Flexibility in design and adaptability for when things change are key features that we build into our product series. These features make all the difference when we need to adapt to the customer’s needs or to those of the site, which doesn’t always come as planned.

Across Asia particularly, types of venue are diverse and in terms of production, timelines are demanding – so the flexibility built into the design of Martin Audio product series, for example FlexPoint and the recently launched BlacklineQ Series, are incredibly popular.

Martin Audio solutions sound great out of the box. BlacklineQ is almost plug and play, with only small touches needed to manage room acoustics. Systems that perform as designed allow integrators to spend less time on site which meets the needs of both regions.

ETA: One of the more understated aspects of Martin Audio’s recent developments — such as improvements in durability, weatherisation, and lifecycle-focused design — is the emphasis on long-term ROI for rental companies and integrators. How important is economic efficiency and asset longevity in shaping your product philosophy today?

HARTER: Ask any of our rental partners. It’s fundamental, and it connects directly to how we think about the two-tier strategy. A rental company investing in a Wavefront Precision system isn’t just buying audio performance, they’re buying an asset that needs to earn across many years and many shows. The durability, the serviceability, the repairability aren’t secondary specifications. They’re part of the engineering brief from day one.

It’s no accident that Martin Audio systems that are still performing at spec many years after purchase. We take great in the longevity of our systems. It reflects a design philosophy that takes the total cost of ownership seriously, because we know that for our customers, a system that is out of service is a system that is not earning.

Our latest Wavefront Precision upgrades are fully retrofittable and at the value end of the market, there’s a reason that the recently launched BlacklineQ series outstripped sales its predecessor, which in its time had been an all-time highest selling range.

BlacklineQ is the first loudspeaker series in its class to incorporate high value features such as Differential Dispersion™ technology, delivering more even audience coverage and improved intelligibility. Lightweight, with rotatable high-frequency devices and flexible mounting options, pound for pound, they are the best sounding speakers around.

ETA: Having led Martin Audio through ownership transitions, a global pandemic, and a rapidly shifting technology landscape, how has your decision-making lens evolved — and what guiding principle do you now rely on when shaping the company’s direction for the next decade?

HARTER: Each of those chapters has sharpened something different. The ownership transitions reinforced how important cultural continuity is. You have to be deliberate about what you protect when the organisational structure around you changes, and for Martin Audio that has always been the sound quality and the integrity of the customer relationship. Neither of those is negotiable, regardless of who’s on the ownership register.

The pandemic was a test of resilience that the entire industry went through together, and I think what it revealed – here and across the sector – was just how much people value live, shared experiences. When live events came back, they came back with an energy and urgency that was genuinely moving. It also gave us the clarity that continued investment in R&D during that period was exactly right. We’re very proud to say that we didn’t stop and we didn’t have to lay off any staff. The product pipeline kept moving, and we emerged into the recovery with more to offer than when we went in.

The principle I keep coming back to, through all of it, is straightforward: does this decision make us better at serving the professional audio community? Not just today’s community, but the engineers and operators and venue owners who will build their careers around this technology over the next decade. Martin Audio exists because generations of professionals have trusted it. Protecting that trust, and extending it is, ultimately, the only strategy that matters.