A visit from Jana Loves Hi-Fi
In May, Jana Dagdagan of Jana Loves Hi-Fi came to spend a few days inside our new facility. The building was still settling, machines newly installed, pictures still to be hung. What she filmed, and the conversations that ran around the filming, became a record of how Marten works that we couldn’t have made ourselves. A visitor sees what we’ve stopped noticing.
Opening doors
The first thing Leif showed her was a violin. Leif’s grandfather Josef built it more than a century ago. The other grandfather, Mårten — the one this company is named after, the middle name Leif also carries — played one. Music and instruments are not metaphors here; they are the line we trace back through the family. Jörgen, the older brother, runs the company. Lars, the youngest, is an art director.
Three brothers, a grandfather who built, a grandfather who played. A loudspeaker cabinet is not a musical instrument, of course. The violin wants to resonate; the cabinet should disappear. The ear came first. The company followed, generations later.
"It's kind of connected—everything.
Music. Instruments."
What takes time
In the new carpentry workshop, Valentin walked her through what happens to walnut before it becomes a front baffle. The planks arrive pre-selected. They acclimatise for weeks. They are cut, planed, cut again, sorted into light and dark, oriented for grain. Three months pass before any piece is ready to be a front.
In the next room, Oskar matches sticks. Nine to a panel — one in the middle, four pairs around it. He works by eye, by experience, by what he calls stomach feeling. When Jana asked him why a particular piece belonged in the centre, he didn’t reach for technical words. He said it should just be nice to look at when you’re sitting and listening.
After CNC, the cabinets are sanded by hand. Then they are lacquered — fifteen coats, often more, sanded between every few. The number isn’t fixed. Each piece tells Oskar when it is finished.
"If it doesn't end up in perfection, I have to do it again and again and again."
In another part of the facility, Daniella terminates cables that will burn in for at least 200 hours before they leave us. Drivers run for 100 hours in their own room. In assembly, almost every pair is built by one person from beginning to end, because handing work between assemblers is how small things get forgotten. Anders has been doing this here for 23 years.
None of this shortens. None of it scales without losing what makes it work. We have learned to plan around the time it actually takes rather than the time we wish it would.
Possibilities
Before dinner at Leif’s, Jörgen took Jana along to his band rehearsal. He plays drums. The band — a fusion group founded in 1981 — now has members aged eighteen to eighty-three. All the generations, in one room.
Over dinner, Jana asked Jörgen whether, in 1998, he had imagined the company would be this size. He said no — and then he said something more honest. The family has, in his phrasing, a lack of filter. We don’t see the problems ahead. We say, how hard can it be. Leif finished the thought: we only see the possibilities.
That trait cost the company about a decade longer of struggle than it had planned for. It also got us here. Coltrane arrived in the early 2000s with a diamond tweeter and pure ceramic drivers, at a moment the internet was beginning to make it possible for a small Swedish brand to be heard about in places it had no way of reaching otherwise. Then, in Jörgen’s words, we suffered for fifteen years, it got a little bit better, and then it took off.
"We don't see the problems ahead.
We say, how hard can it be."
The new facility is what taking off looks like in a brand that won’t change how it builds. More room for the carpentry. A new CNC machine. Three listening rooms, the largest of them a recording studio as well as a reference space. The same four people who were here at the beginning — Jörgen, Leif, Lars and Anders — are still here. The work is the same. There is just more of it now, and a better building to do it in.
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📷 All images © Jana Dagdagan, Jana Loves Hi-Fi.