There is a small controversy concerning the earliest accounts of Peter Noerbaek’s life-long love affair with bringing music to life through advanced electronics. Some family members recall him making his first sound speaker at the age of six. Others say that, as precocious as he was, it was not until he was nine. Regardless, it was the first of scores of speakers he built for friends and family during his high school years while growing up in Aahrus, in the Jutland region of Denmark. He stopped counting when he passed 100 speakers.
Noerbaek studied electrical engineering at the Aarhus Technical School, graduating in 1983. This foundation would give his later work designing electronic components for fully integrated sound systems a sophistication and rock-solid foundation that is still the basis for the advanced, high-end systems he personally both designs and builds today. But his life following graduation would not be a straight line.
Peter spent more than three years as an electronics engineer aboard a merchant marine ship (Denmark being a sea-faring nation), honing his craft and grounding his knowledge in real-world applications that affected the safety and success of his many voyages. In 1986 he took the position of Service Manager with Skako A/S, which brought him to the United States for the first time. It was a decision that would open up whole new opportunities for his extraordinary vision to flourish.
In April of 1992 Peter took the daring move to start his own company—PBN Audio. Beginning with the highly successful Montana line of speaker systems, his philosophy would be based on the simple, impossible premise…Hearing is believing. The engineering approach was equally uncompromising: Only use the best components, intentionally over-building to give maximum “fire power” to effortlessly express the full spectrum of sound. And lastly, to methodically integrate the full audio system from pre-amp to amplifier to turntables and, finally, to speakers–with each and every element, seen and unseen, contributing to the effect of the whole.
The PBN DP7 turntable system used in the Sewanee listening room is at its heart a celebration of the beauty and evocative power of music captured on vinyl recordings, many of them decades old. Whether jazz, pop or classical, each recording pulses with new life in this remarkable room.
Enjoy, hear, and believe.
