Worst Speakers Ever??
So, we’re in the (part time) business running a service operation with the purpose of keeping decent, aging audio gear from ending up in the dumpster. Got a call from a guy a few weeks ago requesting service on some items. He dropped the names of some well known brands -- Sansui, Onkyo, Garrard -- so, he seemed like a legit customer and I agreed to take them in.
When he arrived, the items totaled NINE pieces altogether and included the not-so-glamorous Sanyo, Realistic, etc. I have to mention, however, that the LAB500 was a pleasant surprise and a great example of a high quality "consumer" direct drive, fully automatic turntable.
Then, there were these speaker boxes with the SRL badge on them. Never heard of this brand. Not sure if it was an AARP thing, or a boutique brand that I was not familiar with. I yanked off the grilles and immediately noticed severe foam disintegration around the woofer cones. But, then it become obvious these were no "boutique" speaker. Cheap drivers. A not-so-dense cabinet. Very basic screw input terminals. These were designed to hit a price point. A "promotional" speaker.
A quick Google search lead me to the full name of the speakers -- Sound Research Laboratories -- a "house brand" for University Stereo in SoCal back in the day. This is making sense now. Removing a woofer gave a clear view of the "crossover." Yes, 3 capacitors to provide a high pass so that lower frequencies didn’t blow things up. A later RTA of the refoamed woofer revealed a bandwidth well past 5k. So? With a tweeter crossover at 5k, this would mean that ALL 4 drivers were operating in the same range in at least part of the audio spectrum. Not the best solution for linear, detailed sound. Not being one who likes to copy the Titanic with the hole already in it and head out to sea, I did some "complementary" mods to the speakers to eliminate part of the tug of war between drivers. They didn’t sound quite as awful as they did when they came in.
It got me thinking about my past experiences with "house brands" and "promotional" speakers.
Ah... Ultralinear.
We sold these back in the day. The cabinets were made of some fragmented materials squeezed together to resemble some type of organic substance , with a wood-grained pattern, literally, screen printed onto the box. Some joked that the cabinets were made of GLIT -- half glue, have sh...! Others mentioned that if you took these out of their cardboard cartons and sit them next to them, if a big gust of wind came up the speakers would blow away and the cardboard cartons would still be standing there.
I did have one real example of their build quality and structural integrity. In the "speaker room" we had the big floor standers (Pioneer HPM 200s, for example) on the floor and everything else on the shelves above. The Ultralinear 12" 3-ways were placed on the top shelf. One day I was doing some maintenance in the room and needed to rearrange and rewire some things to the speaker switcher. Then, there was this darned cable that was just a couple of inches too short. I gave it a gentle tug. Nothing happened. So, I put my body into it and gave it an aggressive pull. Right about then I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye. Followed shorty by the horror of watching the Ultralinears plummet from the top shelf and crash onto the HPM200s. The Ultralinears disintegrated on impact. My first thought is that I just ruined a pair of our most expensive speakers -- the Pioneers. I’m going to get fired!! Then, came the dreaded approach to the Pioneers to determine the extent of the damage. Not a scratch!! Not even the walnut veneer was damaged!! And there lay the totaled Ultralinear right next to them.
The Ultralinear speaker days came and went. And, so did I.
botrytis,I still have the Radio Shack Mach 1’s. But, I replaced all the interior wiring, changed the midrange and the tweeters along with a new crossover and 5-way speaker binding posts. Re-braced and sealed the cabinet and now I use it in my pool table area. Actually, doesn’t sound bad. ozzy |
@dynamiclinerarity: In the mid-80’s I saw a pair of the ESS Transtatic I’s for sale in The Recycler (a weekly For Sale newspaper in SoCal), $400 for the pair. One of the B139 woofers had been replaced with an imitation (the oval frame and flat-faced cone), but other than that were fine. I bought ’em and called ESS to get another B139; they had one and only one left! I still have the speakers, a remnant of my youth. 😊 By the way, fans of hi-fi history: The Reason ESS ended up making the Heil Air-Motion Transformer loudspeakers in the 1970’s was precisely because of the Transtatic I. Oscar Heil had a working prototype of his tweeter, and wanted to mate it with the KEF B139 woofer, considered State-Of-The-Art at the time (David Wilson used it as the mid-woofer in his original WAMM). Heil went into the ESS dealer in San Jose---TV-Audio Center on West San Carlos Blvd. (my hi-fi shop at the time), as he had seen the B139 in a pair of Transtatics. They hooked him up with ESS, and the rest is history. Too bad ESS didn’t go with Heil’s idea of using the B139; the woofer (and it’s enclosure) used in the AMT-1 was not up to the task. But I’m sure the B139 would have driven the price of the AMT-1 above their target retail price, $299/ea iirc. ESS sold a lot of them anyway.
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Boy this thread kindled some old memories. Back in the 70's I worked as an tech in the service department for a small chain of stereo stores. One of the speaker lines that the carried was Ultralinear. As mentioned, these speaker were cheap but there were HUGE profit margins in selling them. However, in an effort to come up with a "better, cheaper" product, the sales manager and a few of his half wit sales people came up to service department toward the end of the day and requisitioned a variety of cross over capacitors and a couple sets of alligator clips. Curious to see what they were doing, another tech and I went to check on them when we finished our day. We found them in a basement stock room with an assortment of woofers, mids and tweeters, an empty Ultralinear speaker cabinet. They were trying various combinations of drivers and crossover caps in the cabinet. They would screw them in, hook it up to a receiver, play it for a bit, and then try something else. To say they were clueless is a total understatement. They had no idea of crossover frequency/ capacitor value, they just knew there were some of those in the speaker they opened up and figured they needed some in their design. The other tech and I stood by and watched the circus for probably about 30 minutes when we had seen enough and left. We got a pretty good laugh out of it. I don't think their "speaker designing" ever came to fruition because not much was said after their session, and the caps and alligator clips were returned to the service department the next day. Building speakers back in the day was pretty common place. Does anyone remember a mail order place, I think it was Speaker Works. They sold raw drivers, crossover and plans for cabinets for 2-way to 5 way speaker systems. |
Klipsch speakers are consistently so awful, except for a couple of relatively recent models (one went active) that got redeemed or whatever. Overall, the Klipsclowns seem to have no idea about speaker design. But, they infest every house through bestbuy with their cheap sht and train the young listener’s ears on their crappy sound. Thereafter, he is zombified, he will no longer be able to recognize anything good and will keep looking for that crappy sound. |
The worst "high end" speakers I've ever personally heard are: Every McIntosh Speaker I've ever heard - the ones with the multi tweeters. Just bland, awful sound and a lot of it. Some big expensive NEAT speakers a local dealer demoed for me. He'd given up the Kudos brand for NEAT. I didn't have the heart to tell him just what. mistake he'd made. Some long ago Talon Khorus stand mounted speakers. So bad I thought they were broken. |
