FRANCESCO PELLISARI

Addicted to Sound

From a very early age some lucky people know exactly what their future holds. They know early on if their hobby can become something more and be a springboard for the future.
Things seem that little bit easier when you know you have a natural gift, so it was with Francesco Pellisari, founder of NACSound and respected acoustic consultant. With what he calls his ‘perfect ear’, Francesco can instantly recognize the quality of a sound and tweet it until he gets the best possible sound. Just by walking into a room, whistling and clapping his hands does he know its particular brand of sound. Then by carrying out further studies, he can come up with a speaker which produces the best possible acoustics for that environment.
His technical education and past experience with industrial robots, combined with an artistic family background, meant he always had a special thing for sound. Add to this a predisposition for maths and physics and a keen interest in technology and artificial intelligence, his arrival on the acoustic scene seems almost inevitable. His success as a designer came later as he explored the need to give ‘shape’ to sound as a way of respecting the harmony of every space.

His passion for sound, which started as a hobby in his garage, grew gradually and began to take up more and more of his time. He was also helped by some big names in the field who Francesco had the fortune to meet over the years and who defined the most important steps of his career.

All his speakers tell a story and can be pinpointed to a particular moment, but it is the people he has met who have influenced him the most. Starting with Roy Allison, the acoustic genius and widely considered the ‘father’ of the modern speaker, who Francesco met and worked with in Boston in 1992. Thanks to this experience and above all Allison’s support and trust, Francesco returned to Italy and began to make his very first speaker.

He chose to focus exclusively on speakers because he saw them as the ‘weak link’ in the amplification system. It was the only component not to have been improved upon in the 1920s…because their production, especially high-quality speakers, need a disproportionate manual input and so at that time was not thought economically viable.

After Allison came others just as influential, such as his meeting in 1996 with the highly esteemed architect Michele de Lucchi who gave Francesco the push to finally ‘do something serious’ and create NACSound – NAC stands for New Acoustic Concept – a new company to design and produce speakers. In 1999 he met Ron Arad and together they created the ‘Freewheeler’ speaker and in 2000 Ingo Maurer with whom he went on to design a speaker named in his honour, ‘Ingo Ingo’.

Over the years NAC has grown, working more and more in the professional architecture and designer markets, with a reputation for high quality in the choice of its materials and above all its quest for clean sound.

Since 2007 Francesco has been joined by Alan Cooke who runs the sales arm of the company from London and has many years experience in the field. Today’s production and distribution efficiency is his doing: NACSound makes its unique products to extremely high standards with many parts handmade by skilled craftspeople from various regions of Italy. Before delivery each piece is personally tested by Francesco, who listens carefully to make sure the sound calibration is impeccable. Only when it reaches his high standard of perfection will the speaker get his stamp of approval. This is a long, manual and costly process making our products worthy of the title ‘sculptured sound’.

PRINCIPALI ALLESTIMENTI E COLLABORAZIONI

Spazio Krizia | Milan
Exhibited with Ron Arad and Ingo Maurer at the event organized by Krizia during the Salone del Mobile.

Pompidou Centre | Paris
Collaborated with Ron Arad at the exhibition No Discipline.

Vitra Museum | Berlin
acoustical consultancy.

Concert hall G.F. | Rome
acoustical consultancy.

Ciare spa
consulenza acustica e design nuovo prodotto

Teuco Guzzini
Acoustical consultancy and new product design.

Open Colonna | Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Rome
‘Moltitudini’ acoustic performance. Sonorisation using 140 spherical, ceramic omnidirectional speakers