Connexion
Dizzy Gillespie was a fan. Frank Sinatra bought one for himself and gave them to his Rat Pack friends. Hugh Hefner acquired one for the Playboy Mansion. Clairtone Sound Corp.’s Project G high-fidelity stereo system, which debuted in 1964 at the National Furniture Show in Chicago, was squarely aimed at trendsetters. The intent was to make the sleek, modern stereo an object of desire.
By the time the Project G was introduced, the Toronto-based Clairtone was already well respected for its beautiful, high-end stereos. “Everyone knew about Clairtone,” Peter Munk, president and cofounder of the company, boasted to a newspaper columnist. “The prime minister had one, and if the local truck driver didn’t have one, he wanted one.” Alas, with a price tag of CA $1,850—about the price of a small car—it’s unlikely that the local truck driver would have actually bought a Project G. But he could still dream.
The design of the Project G seemed to come from a dream.
“I want you to imagine that you are visitors from Mars and that you have never seen a Canadian living room, let alone a hi-fi set,” is how designer Hugh Spencer challenged Clairtone’s engineers when they first started working on the Project G. “What are the features that, regardless of design considerations, you would like to see incorporated in a new hi-fi set?”
The film “I’ll Take Sweden” featured a Project G, shown here with co-star Tuesday Weld.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate
The result was a stereo system like no other. Instead of speakers, the Project G had sound globes. Instead of the heavy cabinetry typical of 1960s entertainment consoles, it had sleek, angled rosewood panels balanced on an aluminum stand. At over 2 meters long, it was too big for the average living room but perfect for Hollywood movies—Dean Martin had one in his swinging Malibu bachelor pad in the 1965 film Marriage on the Rocks. According to the 1964 press release announcing the Project G, it was nothing less than “a new sculptured representation of modern sound.”
The first-generation Project G had a high-end Elac Miracord 10H turntable, while later models used a Garrard Lab Series turntable. The transistorized chassis and control panel provided AM, FM, and FM-stereo reception. There was space for storing LPs or for an optional Ampex 1250 reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The “G” in Project G stood for “globe.” The hermetically sealed 46-centimeter-diameter sound globes were made of spun aluminum and mounted at the ends of the cantilevered base; inside were Wharfedale speakers. The sound globes rotated 340 degrees to project a cone of sound and could be tuned to re-create the environment in which the music was originally recorded—a concert hall, cathedral, nightclub, or opera house.
Diane Landry, winner of the 1963 Miss Canada beauty pageant, poses with a Project G2. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate
Initially, Clairtone intended to produce only a handful of the stereos. As one writer later put it, it was more like a concept car “intended to give Clairtone an aura of futuristic cool.” Eventually fewer than 500 were made. But the Project G still became an icon of mod ’60s Canadian design, winning a silver medal at the 13th Milan Triennale, the international design exhibition.
And then it was over; the dream had ended. Eleven years after its founding, Clairtone collapsed, and Munk and cofounder David Gilmour lost control of the company.
The birth of Clairtone Sound Corp.
Clairtone’s Peter Munk lived a colorful life, with a nightmarish start and many fantastic and dreamlike parts too. He was born in 1927 in Budapest to a prosperous Jewish family. In the spring of 1944, Munk and 13 members of his family boarded a train with more than 1,600 Jews bound for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They arrived, but after some weeks the train moved on, eventually reaching neutral Switzerland. It later emerged that the Nazis had extorted large sums of cash and valuables from the occupants in exchange for letting the train proceed.
As a teenager in Switzerland, Munk was a self-described party animal. He enjoyed dancing and dating and going on long ski trips with friends. Schoolwork was not a top priority, and he didn’t have the grades to attend a Swiss university. His mother, an Auschwitz survivor, encouraged him to study in Canada, where he had an uncle.
Before he could enroll, though, Munk blew his tuition money entertaining a young woman during a trip to New York. He then found work picking tobacco, earned enough for tuition, and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1952 with a degree in electrical engineering.
Clairtone cofounders Peter Munk [left] and David Gilmour envisioned the company as a luxury brand.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate
At the age of 30, Munk was making custom hi-fi sets for wealthy clients when he and David Gilmour, who owned a small business importing Scandinavian goods, decided to join forces. Their idea was to create high-fidelity equipment with a contemporary Scandinavian design. Munk’s father-in-law, William Jay Gutterson, invested $3,000. Gilmour mortgaged his house. In 1958, Clairtone Sound Corp. was born.
From the beginning, Munk and Gilmour sought a high-end clientele. They positioned Clairtone as a luxury brand, part of an elegant lifestyle. If you were the type of woman who listened to music while wearing pearls and a strapless gown and lounging on a shag rug, your music would be playing on a Clairtone. If you were a man who dressed smartly and owned an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, you would also be listening on a Clairtone. That was the modern lifestyle captured in the company’s advertisements.
In 1958, Clairtone produced its first prototype: the monophonic 100-M, which had a long, low cabinet made from oiled teak, with a Dual 1004 turntable, a Granco tube chassis, and a pair of Coral speakers. It never went into production, but the next model, the stereophonic 100-S, won a Design Award from Canada’s National Industrial Design Council in 1959. By 1963, Clairtone was selling 25,000 units a year.
Peter Munk visits the Project G assembly line in 1965. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate
Design was always front and center at Clairtone, not just for the products but also for the typography, advertisements, and even the annual reports. Yet nothing in the early designs signaled the dramatic turn it would take with the Project G. That came about because of Hugh Spencer.
Spencer was not an engineer, nor did he have experience designing consumer electronics. His day job was designing sets for the Canadian Broadcast Corp. He consulted regularly with Clairtone on the company’s graphics and signage. The only stereo he ever designed for Clairtone was the Project G, which he first modeled as a wooden box with tennis balls stuck to the sides.
From both design and quality perspectives, Clairtone was successful. But the company was almost always hemorrhaging cash. In 1966, with great fanfare and large government incentives, the company opened a state-of-the-art production facility in Nova Scotia. It was a mismatch. The local workforce didn’t have the necessary skills, and the surrounding infrastructure couldn’t handle the production. On 27 August 1967, Munk and Gilmour were forced out of Clairtone, which became the property of the government of Nova Scotia.
Despite the demise of their first company (and the government inquiry that followed), Munk and Gilmour remained friends and went on to become serial entrepreneurs. Their next venture? A resort in Fiji, which became part of a large hotel chain in that country, Australia, and New Zealand. (Gilmour later founded Fiji Water.) Then Munk and Gilmour bought a gold mine and cofounded Barrick Gold (now Barrick Mining Corp., one of the largest gold mining operations in the world). Their businesses all had ups and downs, but both men became extremely wealthy and noted philanthropists.
Preserving Canadian design
As an example of iconic design, the Project G seems like an ideal specimen for museum collections. And in 1991, Frank Davies, one of the designers who worked for Clairtone, donated a Project G to the recently launched Design Exchange in Toronto. It would be the first object in the DX’s permanent collection, which sought to preserve examples of Canadian design. The museum quickly became Canada’s center for the promotion of design, hosting more than 50 programs each year to teach people about how design influences every aspect of our lives.
In 2008, the museum opened The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958–1971, an exhibition showcasing the company’s distinctive graphic design, industrial design, engineering, and photography.
David Gilmour’s wife, Anna Gilmour, was the company’s first in-house model.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate
But what happened to the DX itself is a reminder that any museum, however worthy, shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2019, the DX abruptly closed its permanent collection, and curators were charged with deaccessioning its objects. Fortunately, the Royal Ontario Museum, Carleton and York Universities, and the Archives of Ontario, among others, were able to accept the artifacts and companion archives. (The Project G pictured at top is now at the Royal Ontario Museum.)
Researchers at York and Carleton have been working to digitize and virtually reconstitute the DX collection, through the xDX Project. They’re using the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) to turn interlinked and contextualized data about the collection into a searchable database. It’s a worthy goal, even if it’s not quite the same as having all of the artifacts and supporting papers physically together in one place. I admit to feeling both pleased about this virtual workaround, and also a little sad that a unified collection that once spoke to the historical significance of Canadian design no longer exists.
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “The Project G Stereo Defined 1960s Cool.”
References
I first learned about Clairtone’s Project G from a panel on Canada’s design heritage organized by York University historian Jan Hadlaw at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.
The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958–1971 by Nina Munk (Peter Munk’s daughter) and Rachel Gotlieb (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) was the companion book to the exhibition of the same name hosted by the Design Exchange in Toronto. It was an invaluable resource for this column.
Journalist Garth Hopkins’s Clairtone: The Rise and Fall of a Business Empire (McClelland & Stewart, 1978) includes many interviews with people associated with the company.
Clairtone is a new documentary by Ron Mann that came out while I was writing this piece. I haven’t been able to view it yet, but I hope to do so soon.
