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High Efficiency Speaker Asylum Need speakers that can rock with just one watt? You found da place. |
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In Reply to: umm, they had "cones with horns" back in the olden days, too posted by mhardy6647 on October 12, 2010 at 06:42:08:
The Allied, Radio Shack and Lafayette catalogs of the late 50's and 60's had hifi speaker pages dominated by a wide selection of coaxial drivers. These were the standard approach during the late monophonic years. They were made primarily by Jensen, Electrovoice, and Goodmans. Many were rebranded Allied, Knight, Heathkit and Lafayette. These were dominated by 12 and 15 inch models sporting whizzer cones, crossovers, HF level controls and horn tweeters. They also had visually impressive cast frames (much like the fins on cars of that era). The idea was to purchase a pair of coaxial drivers, then pick from a number of enclosures, both assembled and pre-cut kits, finished or unfinished. This last step, enclosure choice, was where things really broke down. This was pre-T/S, so it was hit or miss on getting a workable alignment. Unfortunately, the less costly drivers generally had a high Qts and needed a very large enclosure, but were usually combined with smaller, less costly enclosures resulting in a gross mismatch.
Now keep in mind the fact that one of the better coaxial driver/enclosure combinations costed as much or more than an AR-3 or KLH-5, and were typically much larger. The smaller enclosures for a 12 inch driver were about the size of an AR-3. The smaller, often less expensive, acoustic suspension designs offered by AR, KLH, Fisher, ADC, EV, Jensen and many others offered deeper and tighter bass than similar sized coaxial/BR speakers, and were marketed as state of the art. A few early ones used small horn tweeters. These were small magnet (low sensitivity) versions that still needed to be padded down to match the low efficiency bass. The small horns were quickly replaced by the new dome tweeters.
At about this time, solid state amplifiers hit the market place. They dominated the amplifier market by the late 60's. Power levels quickly rose to meet the higher power needs of the new acoustic suspension speakers. To compound things, the new solid state amplifiers did not sound so good through the very revealing horns. Of course, some of the horns were better forgotten anyways. The coaxial drivers were soon considered to be old-fashioned holdovers from the tube/monophonic days.
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