Project G Stereo: A 60s Design Icon

Dizzy Gillespie was a fan. Frank Sinatra bought one for himself and gave it to his friends in the Rat Pack. 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 aimed squarely at trendsetters. The intention was to make the sleek, modern stereo an object of desire.

By the time Project G was introduced, Toronto-based Clairtone was already well respected for its beautiful, high-end stereos. “Everyone knew Clairtone,” Peter Munk, the company’s president and co-founder, boasted to a newspaper columnist. “The Prime Minister had one, and if the local trucker 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 actually bought a Project G. But he could still dream.

The design of Project G seemed like something out of a dream.

“I want you to imagine that you are visitors from Mars and you have never seen a Canadian living room, much less a stereo,” is how designer Hugh Spencer challenged Clairtone engineers when they began work on Project G. “What are the features that, regardless of design considerations, you would like to see incorporated into a new hi-fi system?”

The film “I’ll Take Sweden” featured a G project, 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, Project G had sound globes. Instead of the heavy cabinets typical of 1960s entertainment consoles, it featured sleek, angled rosewood panels balanced on an aluminum stand. Measuring over 2 meters long, it was too big for the average living room, but perfect for Hollywood films: Dean Martin had one in his Malibu bachelor pad in the 1965 film. Wedding on the rocks. According to the 1964 press release announcing Project G, it was nothing less than “a sculpted new representation of modern sound.”

The first generation Project G featured a high-end Elac Miracord 10H turntable, while later models used a Garrard Lab Series turntable. The solid-state chassis and control panel provided AM, FM, and FM stereo reception. There was room to store vinyl records or for an optional Ampex 1250 reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The “G” in Project G stood for “globe.” The 46-centimeter-diameter, hermetically sealed 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 adjusted to recreate 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 stereos. Rather, as one writer later put it, it was a concept car “intended to give Clairtone an aura of futuristic cool.” Ultimately, less than 500 copies were made. But Project G still became an icon of Canadian design in the 1960s, winning a silver medal at the 13th Milan Triennale, the international design exhibition.

And then it was over; the dream was over. Eleven years after its founding, Clairtone collapsed and Munk and his co-founder David Gilmour lost control of the company.

The birth of Clairtone Sound Corp.

Clairtone’s Peter Munk lived a colorful life, with a nightmarish beginning and many fantastical, dreamlike parts as well. He was born in 1927 in Budapest into a wealthy 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 a few weeks the train left again, finally reaching neutral Switzerland. It later emerged that the Nazis had extorted large sums of money and valuables from the occupiers in exchange for allowing the train.

As a teenager in Switzerland, Munk described himself as a party animal. He loved dancing, dating, and taking long ski trips with friends. Schoolwork was not a top priority and he did not have the grades needed to attend a Swiss university. His mother, an Auschwitz survivor, encouraged him to study in Canada, where he had an uncle.

But before he could enroll, Munk wasted his tuition money entertaining a young woman on a trip to New York. He then found work picking tobacco, earned enough to pay his tuition, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto in 1952.

Peter Munk, co-founder of Clairtone [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 stereos for wealthy clients when he and David Gilmour, a small business owner importing Scandinavian goods, decided to join forces. Their idea was to create high-fidelity equipment with 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 out 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 dress and lounging on a shag rug, your music would be playing on a Clairtone. If you were a smartly dressed man who owned an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, you would also listen on a Clairtone. It was the modern lifestyle reflected in the company’s advertisements.

In 1958, Clairtone produced its first prototype: the 100-M monophonic, equipped with a long oiled teak base cabinet, a Dual 1004 vinyl turntable, a Granco tube chassis and a pair of Coral speakers. It was never produced, but the next model, the 100-S stereophonic, won a design award from the National Industrial Design Council of Canada 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 has always been at the forefront at Clairtone, not only for products but also for typography, advertisements and even annual reports. However, nothing in the first designs announced the dramatic turn that Project G would take. This is due to Hugh Spencer.

Spencer was not an engineer, nor did he have experience designing consumer electronics devices. His daily work consisted of designing sets for the Société Radio-Canada. He regularly consulted 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 glued to the sides.

From a design and quality perspective, Clairtone was a success. But the company was almost always short of cash. In 1966, with great fanfare and significant government incentives, the company opened a state-of-the-art production facility in Nova Scotia. It was a mismatch. The local workforce lacked the necessary skills and the surrounding infrastructure could not handle production. On August 27, 1967, Munk and Gilmour were forced to leave Clairtone, which became the property of the Nova Scotia government.

Despite the demise of their first business (and the subsequent government investigation), Munk and Gilmour remained friends and became serial entrepreneurs. Their next adventure? A resort in Fiji, which has become part of a major hotel chain in this country, Australia and New Zealand. (Gilmour later founded Fiji Water.) Next, Munk and Gilmour purchased a gold mine and co-founded Barrick Gold (now Barrick Mining Corp., one of the largest gold mining operations in the world). Their businesses all had their ups and downs, but both men became extremely wealthy and renowned philanthropists.

Preserving Canadian design

As an example of iconic design, Project G appears to be an ideal specimen for museum collections. And in 1991, Frank Davies, one of the designers who worked for Clairtone, donated a G project 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 has quickly become Canada’s center for design promotion, hosting more than 50 programs each year to teach people how design influences every aspect of our lives.

In 2008, the museum opened The art of Clairtone: the creation 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 reminds us that any museum, no matter how worthy, should not be taken for granted. In 2019, the DX abruptly closed its permanent collection and curators were tasked with disposing of 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 associated records. (Project G pictured at top is now in the Royal Ontario Museum.)

Researchers from York and Carleton worked to digitize and virtually reconstruct the DX collection, as part of the xDX project. They use the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) to transform interconnected and contextualized data about the collection into a searchable database. This is a worthy goal, although it is not quite the same as physically collecting all the artifacts and supporting documents in one place. I admit to being both happy with this virtual workaround and also a little sad that a unified collection that once spoke to the historical importance of Canadian design no longer exists.

Part of a continuous series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the limitless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the February 2026 print issue under the title “The Project G Stereo Defined 1960s Cool.”