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In Reply to: RE: Pinging Davidl: utah as2a tweeter response posted by sanman on March 13, 2015 at 09:59:52
According to Dictionary.com the term 'audiophile' was coined in 1951 by High Fidelity magazine and is defined as "a person who has a great interest in high-fidelity sound reproduction."
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Throughout the 1960s there was a large gang of hobbyists who often purchased Knight-branded amplifier and tuner kits from Allied radio (prefix KG), or for the less ambitious, the assembled, KN versions. Allied sold speakers, often either 3-way designs in a single raw unit for insertion into a home-built cabinet, or often kits that contained drivers and boxes They also sold Allied-branded preassembled speakers sourced from Utah, and most of the separate drivers they sold were built by Utah as well. Utah had a thriving business making Allied-branded stuff.
Magazines like HIgh Fidelity and Stereo Review tended to act like this part of the hobby either did not exist at all, or at minimum was of little consequence and not worthy of their attention relative to the companies like AR and KLH that graced the advertizing pages of the magazine. Occasionally, Utah would do an ad for a raw speaker or system in one of the magazines, or one of the magazines would work themselves up to testing Allied-branded electronics (tho I don't recall ever seeing a formal test of a Utah or Allied branded loudspeaker in any of the magazines.)
The people who bought stuff from Allied and also Lafayette catalogs the pre-merger Radio Shack were having a heck of a lot of fun with the hobby.
I've never quite understood why the audiophile magazines treated them as second class. (Are paper cone, cloth-surround drivers wlth AlNiCo magnets really second class?)
David
Dude, give me break. I've heard those things. Not every single model, obviously. But, a few. When I was a kid, one my friend's parents had a pair set up.
Oh man. Talk about undiffentiated boom. "It's all about dat bass. NO TREBLE".
That was one set. The others are so colored, so crappy, that they give consoles a run for the Lo-Fi money sweepstakes.
That's not to say that guys who salivate over old stuff don't swear by their heavenly sound. But, there are guys who live in putrid shacks with leaking roofs, so...so much for that.
Any decent speaker today sounds so much better. Heck, if you're going to collect old stuff, at least make it worth your while. Get the good old stuff. A set of Voice of the Theaters, or JBL L-100's, for example. Even the Marantz Imperial Sixes had decent sound. Something decent. cause old and shabby is just old and shabby. And KLH Electrostatics those Allied/Utah are not.
You had me on your side until you wrote the L-100 as an example of good stuff. Talk about a screeching colored horrid sounding putrid sounding speaker. One of the first that taught me what it sounded and felt like scraping finger nails across a slate chalk board. The Marantz Six is only a might better but built to a low price point and showed me the old Marantz was forever gone.
Don Brian Levy, J.D.
Toronto ON Canada
Yes.
If you really wanted to assemble a quality system back then, you could buy raw drivers from Altec and JBL. A universe of difference.
...
Greetings once again from Sactown, DavidLD. After moi became gainfully employed back in the late 70s, a Ratio Shaq employee sold moi on their Realistic branded 12" Utah Cadence instrument speakers for hi-fi duty. Said they made lousy guitar speakers, because they neither produced distortion like Celestions nor could survive massive instrument amp volumes. But for audio reproduction, they were a poor person's Electro Voice. Revealed various amp intonations quite nicely. And man could they pump that bass, coupled with a fairly strong mid-range, in two-way configuration. Still use a pair for Hafler rear-channel duty. So it's kinda ironic that several decades later Utah instrument speakers would find a niche with lower powered instrument amplification amongst diy hobbyists. An 8" driver converted an original generation Fender Sidekick 10 into easily-emulated Derek & Dominos Live In Concert tone quite nicely. Wonder if it woulda sounded the same with an 8" Pyle Driver, which came from the same Chicago manufacturing plant???
I had some 10" Utah full range drivers in a homemade, but very well constructed cabinet that sounded remarkably like my Dynaco A25's. Implementation is very important.
Dave
Altec and JBL both made paper coned, cloth surround alnico magnet drivers...
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