Weinreich Labs is reinventing the violin in Ann Arbor, creating technology that preserves the quality of the amplified and recorded sounds of the instrument.
The 2-year-old start-up was founded by a violin maker, a physicist, an engineer and a designer. The company's instrument is a violin that produces heirloom quality music when amplified or recorded. It is expected to give musicians the ability to amplify a acoustic sound (think stereo speakers) without feedback or loss of tonal character, problems that have long plagued the music industry.
"If a players buys one of our products they're buying an instrument that sounds great in an amplified setting," says Alex Sobolev, CEO of
Weinreich Labs. "It also works in a recording studio where it can be very challenging to properly mic stringed instruments."
Weinreich Labs' four person team is putting the finishing touches on its prototypes and plans to begin commercializing its violins early next year. The firm recently received financing from the
Michigan Microloan Fund (each microloan is worth about five figures worth of seed capital on average) that it is using to buy production-quality electronics and develop a mobile app.
"This loan does a number of things for us," Sobolev says. "In the worst-case scenario, this gets us to a trade show with a number of prototypes to showcase."
Source: Alex Sobolev, CEO of Weinreich Labs
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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