MartinLogan was founded by Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland who met in the late '70s at a high-end audio store Sanders managed in Lawrence, Kansas. Despite very different backgrounds (Sanders had trained in architecture and advertising, Sutherland in electrical engineering) they shared a passion for music and electrostatic loudspeakers. Discussion of electrostatic speakers and the current available technology led to Sanders and Sutherland to design and build an electrostatic speaker with the goal of producing adequate bass output, provide sound dispersion without arcing, destroying amplifiers, or otherwise offending people not interested in a living-room science project. Sanders organized a small research and development team to transform an original design he had tinkered with for more than a decade into a practical, marketable electrostatic transducer.