Henry Kristanto
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
As told to a visitor who stayed too long
In a kitchen-door factory in Guangdong province — a place that made piano-finish doors and nothing else, the air sweet with lacquer and the floor stacked with twenty-litre cans of finishing compound — a young Indonesian furniture maker stood watching the doors go by. Spray. Oven. Spray. Oven. Then the sanding: coarse paper, fine paper, finer still, and at last a polish done with water. He wasn't there for the doors. He was there to learn what a surface has to endure before it deserves the word finished.
That man was Henry Kristanto, and I mention the doors first because Henry did: when I asked him, in the workshop where he now builds the Alexandria Audio loudspeakers, how he got started in audio, he answered with hinges, aluminium extrusion, kiln-drying chambers, and the trade fairs of southern China — the whole grammar of making things — before a single loudspeaker entered the story. His family ran a furniture workshop in Indonesia. He learned manufacturing the way other men learn fishing: standing next to someone who was doing it, for years. Most loudspeaker designers come to woodworking late and reluctantly, as a box their drivers must live in. Henry came to drivers late. The box he already knew.
A LETTER TO MR. JORDAN
The drivers arrived when he was 17, and even then he didn't cut the wood himself — he commissioned a cabinet maker to build a transmission line around a Jordan JX92S, then wrote to Ted Jordan, the English full-range eminence himself, to ask how one ought to filter a second, smaller driver. Jordan wrote back: first-order. Consider that for a moment — a teenager in Indonesia, corresponding about crossover slopes with one of the hobby's genuine originals — and then consider that Henry regards this as an unremarkable thing to have done. It was a question. He asked the man who would know.
THE SYDNEY CENSUS
The serious years began in Sydney, in 2012, where a master's degree in law with a merciful timetable left him with the two raw materials of every audio obsession: free time and a nearby parts distributor. What followed was less a hobby than a census. Drivers from Denmark, Italy, and the United States; waveguides in threes; ribbons, domes, and compression drivers; some ten to fourteen horn profiles bought and compared, plus twenty-five fiberglass horns ordered from Poland in a single transaction; and one ribbon tweeter from Russia that two couriers refused to carry and that Henry, to this day, has never heard. He did not read opinions. He purchased them, built them, measured them, listened to them, and sold the losers.
And here I must confess the moment my own composure failed: he let me handle one of the surviving Le Cléac'h horns — an elliptical thing, secondhand from Perth, the profile that beat every other profile in his long tournament — and I wanted it the way a schoolboy wants a motorcycle. I asked, with what I hoped was journalistic detachment, whether any were for sale. No dice.
THE NIGHT THE MUSIC GOT EASY
Two experiences aimed all of this. The first was a friend's pair of Altec A7s — the old Voice of the Theatre, grey cabinets, steel multicell horn — which Henry heard after years of assuming he disliked horns. "The music was so easy," he told me. "It reached me effortlessly. I thought: what is this?" The second was a jazz room across the road from his university, where students got in for ten dollars and local musicians played through workaday PA gear in an unlovely room, and where Henry went at minimum twice a month for years. Between the two of them you have the entire Alexandria design brief: the ease of a great horn, calibrated against the sound of actual people playing actual instruments in rooms that nobody treated, flattered, or forgave.
His conclusions cost him money, and the dearest one concerned money itself. Henry once built an ambitious three-way loaded with costly drivers and the most expensive boutique capacitors he could order, and it was beaten — not edged out but beaten, for sheer enjoyment — by a simple two-way horn wearing the cheapest capacitors in the catalog. "Boutique caps are not the solution," he says now, with the calm of a man reporting a lab result. "It's the design, and the inherent capability of the parts." That lesson is why an Alexandria owner's money goes into drivers, geometry, and labor rather than jewelry — and why, when audiophile friends drove up from Melbourne to hear the two-way that started it all, every one of them said some version of the same sentence: the first horn that isn't honky. That sentence founded a company. Two companies, as it turned out.
REDEFY: THE APPRENTICESHIP IN PUBLIC
The first was called Redefy Audio, and it was Henry's Sydney years made incorporate. Its flagship, the Two, was the census distilled: a big floorstander that looked like a polite two-way from the front and hid a 15-inch woofer in its flank, an 8-inch paper-cone midrange in its own isolated enclosure, and a compression driver in a deep aluminium horn up top — birch ply throughout, chosen (Henry said at the time) for its weight and its "wonderful tone." When Edgar Kramer reviewed the Two for 6moons, he opened by asking whether the world really needed another loudspeaker manufacturer, and then answered his own question by spending several thousand words on this one. The price was AU$8,500 the pair — which bought you, at that moment in high-end history, roughly one fashionable power cord.
Redefy Audio horn loudspeaker. Photo via AudioCircle.
Henry Kristanto showcasing Redefy Audio at the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show, Sydney, 2015.
Redefy showed in public early and often — at the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show in Sydney in 2015, and at shows overseas besides. The Sydney Audio Club had him in twice — first in April 2016 with the Two, then again in July 2017, on the club's tenth birthday, where his Redefy Monitor speakers shared the bill with a barbecue, a raffle, a music quiz, and a positively humongous cake. The feedback forms survive, and they read like a jury that forgot it was supposed to be difficult: "Very impressed by Redefy speakers." "Preferred the black speakers." "Honest sound, good value for the price." A tube amplifier scheduled for the demonstration failed the night before — valves — and Henry apologized for it the way other men apologize for the weather, then played thirty-five minutes of music through the substitute and let the speakers make his argument.
The Redefy Active Ref Monitor, 2019 — proprietary drivers, waveguided beryllium tweeter, sealed bass, onboard DSP. Photo: SoundStage! Australia.
By 2019 Redefy had followed its founder home to Indonesia, and its last announced product is the most instructive thing in the whole archive: an active studio-grade monitor with proprietary drivers built to Henry's specification, a waveguided beryllium tweeter for controlled directivity, sealed bass, and a DSP engine with placement presets — a speaker designed, in his own words to SoundStage! Australia, "to control the sound dispersion, for reduced room interactions and to sound more consistent in different rooms." Read that twice. Years before Alexandria Audio existed, Henry had already named his enemy — the customer's room — and had already built the digital answer to it. "I'm always fascinated with large high sensitivity speakers that also involve a rather large horn," he told the same magazine. "The reality is that not many people have the luxury of a large space and room to accommodate them." There is the other obsession: the horn, miniaturized, brought indoors, made domestic. Alexandria is what happened when he decided to solve both problems the hard way — passively, with geometry, sensitivity, and cabinet work, rather than with a signal processor.
ALEXANDRIA: THE HARD WAY, AT HOME
The Praetoria at Alexandria Audio's launch, August 2022. Photo: SoundStage! Australia.
Alexandria Audio was founded in Denpasar, Bali, with co-founder Kenneth Lin — a partner Henry describes simply: they enjoy music the same way. The company launched in 2022 with The Monitor and the horn-loaded Praetoria, voiced against Shindo valve amplification and Gryphon Class-A solid state, and it inherited everything above: the doors, the census, the Altec night, the capacitor lesson, the Redefy apprenticeship.
The Monitor at Alexandria Audio's launch, 2022. Photo via AudioCircle.
About the cabinets, which brought us back to the doors. The fashionable answer to cabinet resonance is to kill it — mass, bracing, damping, the enclosure as mausoleum. Henry's answer, worked out from structural-engineering principle and the behavior of the materials themselves, is to manage it: in the Praetoria and the Atrium, no panel is directly joined to another, and each element — panel, column, top, bottom — is built to a different resonance, so that no two parts of the box ever agree on a note long enough to amplify it. He is blunt that this is not tuned-by-ear mysticism ("absolutely not," was the full extent of his patience with the suggestion), and blunter still about the economics: skipping the engineering would have been cheaper and easier to build. He built the hard one.
The same stubbornness shows up as generosity on the Praetoria's back panel, which carries two controls — one for overall treble energy, to suit lively rooms and dead ones, and one for the sparkle above 10kHz, to suit taste and, Henry notes without embarrassment, the plain fact that ears age. Why give the customer two knobs when the high-end mostly gives none? "Because the customer deserves it," he said. "They pay a lot of money. They want the best performance possible in their room — and they can have it."
There it is, if you want the company's philosophy in one breath: the room you actually have, the ears you actually have, the music you actually love. Everything Alexandria builds in its Bali workshop — the Atrium, the Praetoria, The Monitor, the Gravitas bass system, each unit matched, measured, and auditioned before it ships — is a different-sized answer to the question Henry has been asking since that night in front of the Altecs: how do you make the music this easy, everywhere?
The last thing he does before a pair leaves the workshop is run his hand over the finish — coarse to fine to finer, the way the door-makers taught him. Then he listens. Not to the speaker. To the music.
Alexandria Audio at Hi End Asia Singapore 2025, held at Suntec Singapore Convention Centre. Graced by the legendary Jazz icon, Anne Bisson.