Panasonic Thrusters. Prove me wrong.
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.
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I sold crappy speakers back in the 1970's on the east coast near NYC. I can't remember all the brands, but the BSR speakers come to mind, and then BOSE came out with a low end line (not to say that their main line 301, 501, 601, 901's sounded any good....) they were built cheap and sounded the same. We had a private brand that actually sounded OK even if they were cheaply built, but the mark up was amazing and so were the commisions, so we sold a lot fo them. I thought the Cerwin Vega's sounded OK, with the right rock music. They were built pretty well also. |
In the mid 70s I worked for a Philadelphia area chain called Wall to Wall Sound. I could tell you stories about them but I'll stick to one speaker sale. I was selling a decent receiver with a set of speakers. We had 2 levels of house brand speakers, so so and really bad. I sold the customer a set of 2 cubic foot 3 way speakers with 12 " woofers. We would tell the customers that they were well known speakers on the west coast. The woofers had no surround, just a roll in the driver paper. I went in the back room for a new, sealed set of speakers and picked one up. I panicked. It was so light it almost flew out of my hands. I wasn't even sure there was a speaker in the card board box. There was. I still feel a bit of guilt when I think of the sale. Thanks for reminding me. |
I used a KLH system (model 20 maybe...the one without the FM tuner) in the 70s as the speakers sounded simply better than anything else I could afford. Most of my budget went to guitars and guitar amps etc. as I was a working musician so I hung with the KLH rig for years. I noticed over those years that Japanese speakers just sucked...Pioneer, Sansui...bleah...JBL was all very well designed and built (the best pro stuff around, especially bass guitar 15s) and had a frequency graph like a big smile. Also dragged a pair of Altec A7s around for PA...put some recorded music through those and man...beautiful. |
@ozzy some years back there was a plausible reason suggested for why those ALS’s did not perform well (too bright) - allegedly, Carver or his company may have implemented knockoffs of the original HiVi tweeter design (below per diyAudio cut-and-pasted from Carver website ~2015/16): "Mr. Carver, I admire your achievements in Audio but pelase do not disinform your clients and public. The RT-2 ribbon tweeter for your Cinema line was developed by me when I worked at HI-Vi Research at that time in Toronto. It was developed in the beginning of 1997 and around the end of 1997 we started advertising it in Voice Coil and Speakerbuilder magazines. You asked for Rt-2 samples around that time and then showed the Cinema system prototype at 1999 CES I believe with a great sucess. In about a year, in 1999 we at Hi-Vi inclduing its president Mr.Hongbo Yao were very much amazed with the number of RT-2 tweeter copies that another chinese company started showing in China. We learned that they indeed copied HI-Vi’s RT-2 by request of your supplier who was supposed to make Cinema system for you. At that time it was not Homni. If you went back to HI-Vi tweeters since then, good for you, becase I have almost all RT-2 copies from about 3-4 Chinese vendros and none of them performs like RT-2 tweeter. Ouch!
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