Refined Sound
In Its Most Musical Form
Semrad Audio is the work of a master cabinetmaker who has spent the same forty years among the most serious listeners in audio. John Semrad’s career was the restoration and recreation of museum-quality historical furniture — work measured against originals in private collections and institutions. Through those same decades, he sharpened his ear inside the audiophile community at its highest level. Few people anywhere have stood at the top of both disciplines. With his restoration practice now closed, the whole of that craft and the whole of that ear are turned, undivided, toward a single object — and to commission a pair is to receive that undivided attention.
The brief is a simple one: build a loudspeaker that gets out of the way of the recording. Years of restoring fine furniture taught John Semrad to read wood — its grain, its rigidity, the way it rings or stays silent under load. Years of listening taught him what gets in the music’s way, and what lets it breathe.
What emerges when these two disciplines meet in a single object is the sound of nothing fighting the recording: bass with speed, weight, and tactile energy; huge dynamics distributed evenly across an extended frequency range; and an involving presentation with realistic presence from singers and instruments. Micro-detail, note attacks, and decays remain unmasked. Close your eyes and the loudspeakers disappear, leaving a presentation that hands the music back to the listener intact.
Each midrange is loaded by a Le Cléac’h–profile horn flare — wavefront geometry developed by the French acoustician Jean-Michel Le Cléac’h, calculated across millions of discrete elements for near-perfect phase coherence. Horn loading multiplies the driver’s efficiency by an order of magnitude, allowing a single watt to fill a large room at full musical scale. The Le Cléac’h profile in particular suppresses the boxy, cupped colorations of lesser horn designs, so voices stay natural and the speaker disappears into the room.
At the heart of each speaker sits an 8-inch field coil driver with a cone of Korean mulberry-bark paper — a fiber long prized in the East for its tensile strength and natural damping, qualities that let it track transient detail without smearing or coloring it. The field coil itself is an electromagnet, fed by a dedicated supply: where a permanent magnet imposes a fixed field, a field coil produces a flux that is stronger, more linear, and more responsive to the smallest cues in the recording. Below it, a 12-inch Alnico-magnet bass driver carries the foundation.
Each cabinet is built and finished by the same hands that spent a career on museum-grade restoration. Eight hand-picked veneers form the lineup — from Macassar Ebony to figured walnut and mappa burls — each matched, book-laid, and finished by John Semrad himself. Each pair takes more than three hundred hours of his own work. Traditional joinery and a master cabinetmaker’s standard of finish: beautiful enough to belong in any room, and quiet enough never to demand attention.
The cabinet is a study in rigidity and silence. Hand-picked veneers are laid over a core of solid basswood and poplar cross-ply — basswood for tonal neutrality, poplar for dimensional stability, cross-plying for the elimination of long-grain resonance under load. The result, joined to museum-restoration standards, is dead-quiet under the bass driver’s pressure, with nothing in the music’s way.
“Semrad Audio speakers deliver breathtaking sound performance, creating a rich and immersive soundstage free from listening fatigue.”
Each cabinet begins with a single, hand-selected veneer. Choose a finish to see the pair come to life.
The piano-black bass variant for this veneer is in production. The matched-veneer rendering remains available.
Every Semrad speaker is handcrafted to order — each cabinet a singular object, drawn from the listener’s chosen veneer.
Bespoke commissions sit closest to John Semrad’s previous craft. Sculpted forms, custom finishes, hand-laid leaf, and design conversations carried out the way the master cabinetmakers carried them out — directly with the owner. The Eugene Printz–inspired pair shown here is one such object. A small number are accepted each year.
A Eugene Printz–inspired commission, finished in patinated gold leaf over high-gloss lacquer.
They belong in a museum for their craftsmanship alone. When playing, music just flowed out of them like there were no boundaries between the listener and the performer.
This system offered the kind of intimate, tactile, rich, and real-life feel that I could move into and live happily ever after within.
The sound of Semrad Audio’s rig was sublime. The system presented all the sinew, richness and emotion of Coltrane’s tenor as grandly as I’ve ever heard.
Each Semrad Audio speaker is a unique creation. Contact us to discuss a commission or to arrange a private listening session.