ALMA Announces New President and Vice Presidents

ALMA elected new officers within its Board of Directors at the ALMA Symposium in Las Vegas. Stu Lumsden, VP of Engineering at Polk Audio was elected President. He has served on the board for several years, most recently as Vice President.

As part of ALMA’s drive to become more international, three vice presidents were appointed, one for each major loudspeaker-producing region of the world. Bart Young of Acoustic Design Inc will represent North and South America, US, Wolfgang Klippel of Klippel GmbH will represent Europe and Phil Bunch of Phase Design will represent Asia. This international diversity will ensure that the interests and needs of each continent are well understood by the board, enabling ALMA to continue to be recognized as the leading worldwide authority and networking community for the loudspeaker industry. It will also facilitate ALMA’s international recruitment drive – an important 2006 marketing activity.

Stu Lumsden, Polk Audio – President
Stu Lumsden joined Polk Audio in January of 1977 as the 23rd employee and has continued there for his entire 30 year career in the loudspeaker industry. During that time he has worked in virtually every area of loudspeaker manufacturing and design. His primary focus over that past 20 years has been in the design & development of new transducers and loudspeaker systems. Stu is currently the VP of Engineering at Polk Audio. He holds a masters degree in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University in his native Baltimore and studied undergraduate communications and physics at Towson University. Stu has been an active member of the AES, ALMA and the Product Development Management Association. He has served as VP for ALMA for the past two years.

Bart Young, Acoustic Design, Inc – Vice President, North and South America
Bart Young is second generation leadership for Acoustic Design, Inc (ADI) and its family of companies. ADI provides support to manufacturers and OEMs in the loudspeaker and related fields.  ADI has grown from a single facility manufacturer's representative into a complete source for electro-mechanical device manufacturing with facilities in Asia and the United States. Mr. Young has been active in ALMA for more than 10 years and continues to promote the organization and its benefits worldwide. ADI and its companies provide goods and services to almost every level of loudspeaker manufacturer worldwide and supplies specialized manufacturing equipment for magnetic charging to the industry.

Wolfgang Klippel, Klippel GmbH – Vice President, Europe
Wolfgang Klippel founded Klippel GmbH in 1997 to produce novel control and measurement systems for loudspeakers and other transducers. Prior to that he worked at a loudspeaker company in Leipzig where he was engaged in the research of transducer modeling, acoustic measurement and psychoacoustics, and also worked at the Audio Research Group in Waterloo, Canada and Harman International in Northridge, CA before moving back to his native Germany in 1995 to become a consulting engineer. He holds a doctor-engineering degree in technical acoustics and he studied electrical engineering at the University of Technology in Dresden where he graduated in Speech recognition.  Wolfgang has been on the ALMA board for the past year and has assisted in organizing member-drives at recent AES shows in the US and Europe.

Phil Bunch, Phase Design – Vice President, Asia
Phil Bunch is the founder of Phase design, a Shenzhen, China based company providing engineering, design and QA services to the audio industry. Phase Design also manufactures precision assembly equipment and systems for manufacturing drivers, tweeters and full assemblies. He founded the company 4 years ago after holding the position of operations director for Eastern Asia Industries and Engineering manager for Esoteric Group.  Phil’s wife, Nancy, is also a big part of Phase Design. She holds several high level certificates for Chinese—English translation and is well known in the industry here in Asia. Phase Design provided translation services to the 2004 and 2005 ALMA symposium in China and will be active in the 2006 symposium in China.

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