Horn Porn Tour V: Western Electric, Leipzig, Germany

[bonzo]

Well Saturday morning started with me comparing the Lampi to a guy's Kuzma TT just outside London (he is floored), then me flying to Leipzig, Germany (birthplace of Mahler, I think, and where Bach played in a church), stayed overnight, today morning heard the Western Electric speaker, and flew back straight to Barbican for Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances. Great weekend.

So, the western electric horns are built by Silbatone, which also displays them at Munich (Silbatone is a non-profitable hobby, I think, for one of the Hyundai owners). The WE drivers are built by GIP (Japanese) and Line Magnetic (Chinese). GIP drivers are twice the price.

The one I heard was the first speaker ever made, and because it was used in a cinema to address a crowd of roughly 800, it crosses over the front axis to opposite corners so that everyone in the front row can hear, and then the sound carries forward like a mono. You actually get some stereo image two feet away, but as you go further back you get a mono. The best thing was, if you move around 180 degrees, the sound is excellent throughout - it just never goes off axis.

For those who heard the WE at Munich this year, this was a very similar presentation. The voice just floated out. It was being driven by Silvercore amps with WE 300b valves. For Schubert's Winterreise, and other opera, Elia Fitzgerald, or Billy Halliday, this is the best sound I can think of by far. Violins and piano and brass are great. Tonality and Timbre is superb.

So I put in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, thinking I would throw it off with bass and dynamics. The guy had a woofer behind the curtains using the whole wall as a baffle. It was great. The speaker is crossoverless down to almost 70Hz.

The width is 2.8m, 60cm deep, 220 kgs (400lbs) of steel. Easily a speaker I could live with. Mind you, this is not a hifi speaker like Trios with bass horns that will tick off a hifi checklist. On some music, it might irritate you. Rough costs are just over 25 - 30k EUR with the line magnetic drivers and over 35k with the GIP ones. One can start with line magnetic and upgrade to GIP.

Just hang the speaker on your wall, add a woofer, and you are done.

The guy also had a pair of Altec Horns. He is the manufacturer of Silvercore amps and is a distributor for GIP.

 

[bonzo]

^^ The last pic shows the guy next to me dozing at Rachamaninov's dances. Seriously. Slept throughout and woke up at the applause. Must have been an objectivist.

 

[Bernard]

^^ The last pic shows the guy next to me dozing at Rachamaninov's dances. Seriously. Slept throughout and woke up at the applause. Must have been an objectivist.

Friend of yours, Kedar?

 

[amey01]

Cool......

 

[bonzo]

 

[RCHeliGuy]

It's nice to see that audio was perfected 90 years ago and has only gone downhill since then

 

[bonzo]

It's nice to see that audio was perfected 90 years ago and has only gone downhill since then

Maybe that was meant to be sarcastic, but regarding WE, this is a well known truth. The drivers came from bell labs who put tons and tons of money and science behind it that today's hifi companies can only dream of.

 

[bonzo]

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mult...ave-we-come-last-100-years-8.html#post2948616

"I thought I'd elaborate on why the top sixties HiFi was better than most junk you buy today. But this is not for discussion. I will simply state 6 good reasons, and you can stuff them in your pipe and smoke them.

1) Engineers were older, had lived through WW2 and had a much broader background in Radio and antennas and high frequencies and would even make their own components like coils and oiled paper capacitors. They had far better mental arithmetic ability than most of you, and could use a Smith chart for matching impedance and a slide rule for calculation much faster than you can with computers:





2) I have no particular axe to grind on transistors versus valves, and in fact classic performers like the Radford STA25 had a single rail transistor preamplifier driving a valve output stage with a defined source impedance. But they were Class A designs with all the lovely cancellation of common-mode that makes them sound so good. The power supply for instance had only to drive a constant current and all electrolytic capacitors had the proper bias which keeps them linear.

3) Record pickups were wide bandwidth and low source inductance moving coil designs. These avoided trying to jump out of the groove due to LC resonances which plagued later moving magnet designs and LP crackle and pop was less obtrusive.

4) Bass speakers would often be 10" paper cones in huge solid closed boxes mounted literally as bookshelves against a wall. Tweeters would often be simple 3" paper cones with a single capacitor crossover. It didn't much matter how good the speaker surround was, because acoustic suspension essentially kept the speaker linear. Frequency response was probably not the last word, but rolled off gently. In fact the reputable WLM La Scala speakers rather recreate these babies.

5) Components like transistors were doubtless not as fast, but then feedback was kept much lower too, so gross distortions like slewing tended to be avoided in favour of gentle rolloff of frequency response.

6) Recording engineers really knew their equipment like the backs of their hands. They set up levels to avoid overload and at their peak would record straight to the record-cutting lathe via a mere couple of microphones with no recording console worth mentioning. The result was breathtakingly direct recordings like Count Basie with Frank Sinatra, which if you've never heard them on Vinyl with it's 70dB signal to noise ratio, well you haven't lived, my friends! "

 

[bonzo]

Here are a few things Joe Roberts commented on Lenco Heaven

"I never heard Line Magnetic but I heard GIP Vintage series (mesh 555 and 597A) sounding BETTER than the originals. The GIP "Field HiFi Series" 18" is one of the greatest cone speakers I ever heard.

I think WE design principles may outweigh the field coil aspect. You can field coil anything. Fertin might be the coolest but it has nothing to do with 1930 Western.

I heard a Chinese 597A tweeters (branded "Western Labo" ) in a 15A club installation with 41-42-43 amps and a 49 line amp. The tweeter was robotic sounding. Tone and feeling were way off. Switching to a pair of real WE597A totally changed the mood. Even non-audiophile people in the room instantly noticed.

Since the tweeter is so crucial, I'd look at the GIP. Suzuki makes several killer tweeters.

I estimate that GIP drivers will cost at least twice as much as LM, but they could be the best thing available on the planet. There is another line of GIP that is less expensive which doesn't emphasize the authentic cosmetics. I am pretty sure they use a lot of the same parts.

People seem to like the LM555. Maye you even heard them in Hamburg?

I like the price on LM a lot more! Actually, LM is too expensive also. ALL OF THIS STUFF IS TOO EXPENSIVE.


This is the big problem---> Western Electric is the Sport of Kings


I am not a king but I know some kings--or at least people who can blow $250-500k or more on audio at one time without blinking. These are the people who have the big complete Western setups. Very tough competition. People will pay crazy money for the best.

Extraordinary effort goes into every step toward this goal. This is true for collecting and restoring original gear and making perfectionist reproductions like Aldo and Suzuki. This is a totally dedicated subculture that has taken every detail to the extreme. Everything is under a magnifying glass and held to a high standard.

I played around a lot when it was more reasonable to own some nice WE gear. in Korea last month, I auditioned those Munich 15As using a 555 driver I sold to MJ back in 1988! He remembered the price ...$350. I said "That's OK. I robbed you anyway...it was only worth $200!" I probably paid $150.

I am really glad that I have cured myself of the desire to own this stuff. I know what it is and what it does and I love it, but I don't need to own it. As long as I get to listen a few times a year, I am happy.

I think a smart operator can do a Wide Range setup for less than an Asian businessman would pay for a turnkey system but it is not a poor man's game.

Just remember that you can't compromise the basics and if enough compromises and substitutions are made, it is no longer a WE system but an inspired collection of speaker components.

These damn drivers aren't even called "speakers" they are "Receivers" and "Loud Speaking Telephones." It is a different thing. Different world.

From what I have heard, sticking as closely as possible to the official WE program will take you to a special place.

Yeah, it sure sucks to be poor...but fortunately I can get by on ALTEC."

 

[RCHeliGuy]

My opinion is that you are romanticizing old technology and older engineers.

Today we have a much larger population, far more engineers ( although the US is lagging and peaked in the early 80's ) and they are much better connected. This connectivity because of the Internet allows them to exchange ideas much faster. It's almost like having a larger brain. We are seeing an exponential growth in technology.

As an example, because of the Internet and computer tools I was able to design and put a metal fabricated product into production myself without a company backing me, and recently over the last 6 months I designed and built a fairly elaborate solution for a small niche I'm involved with. I had the input of many other people who helped improve the design. This is a very empowering world we live in today. Look at Elon Musk and his companies SpaceX and Tesla. He decided to become a rocket scientist and created a company that is now putting rockets in space. Not only that but they are doing it much less expensively than the other big aeronautical firms. Tesla came out of silicon valley and is scaling up the production of electric cars. This company has pushed other car companies because of how much more efficiently they designed and built a car from scratch for a small fraction what it takes a big auto company to create a new car.

We are getting ready to see an explosion of creativity unleashed with the advances in 3D printing and personal CNC machines combined with spacial 3D modeling that you can manipulate with your hands very similar to what you saw in Iron Man.

As an electrical engineer who was forced to use a slide rule as an exercise, I agree that there is some speed for doing VERY basic calculations, but a slide rule in no way even comes remotely close to the engineering tools available on computers.

Heck even in the early 90's we were doing things with the Silicon Graphics machines that engineers of the previous generation could only dream of. The electronics of their day were extremely crude.

So once again I think you are casting a wistful eye back just like people who suggest that the 1950's were a much better time based on Normand Rockwell images instead of reality.

 

[bonzo]

Your opinion about people romanticizing WE technology, and thinking new thing is progress, is such a strawman argument that has been done to death before, so I will leave it to you go to the diyaudio link I provided, or at Lenco Heaven, and read replies to you to prove you wrong. I can't even be bothered, sorry. I do accept that Britney is better than Bach and Beethoven and that compressed mp3 following loudness wars is better than well-recorded vinyl from the 60s. Only if you knew how much GIP labs spends on audio research as compared to the rest of the HiFi industry, in order to make the WE gear for those billionaires who can afford to buy Wilson Alexandrias like you can buy Bose.

As a start, it would be good if you hold back the armchair commentary, and instead go out and listen to stuff and do some reading. And ask yourself why vinyl and valves still exist. Or is the objective of current hifi to produce good sound or to make it domestically justifiable?

ps: An electrical engineer is underqualified in my book

 

[RCHeliGuy]

In my first job out of college I worked for a start up with PhD's from AT&T and Sylvania think tanks to work on the blasphemy called digital audio. We had two mathematicians from Israel working on the algorithms that we used to shape music recorded in the studio. They combed collegiate dissertations looking for the kinds of math that we could repurpose.

The one break through that we made was in equalization using finite impulse response filtering. Unlike analog equalization FIR filtering allowed equalization without destroying the phase of the music signal which would preserve the spacial information that generates the sound stage we all love to hear. Like it or not studio engineers do adjust the frequency response of the music tracks they are mixing together.

We have improved the sensitivity and frequency response of microphone technology while reducing artifacts. We have created mediums to capture music that do not degrade over time or wear out with signal to noise ratios and dynamic range that are unheard of in the analog world. We have found ways to master this purer sound without destroying it.

The type of person who might create a new speaker technology that we have never seen before is much more likely to do so today than at any point in history.

There is a serious issue in that the US is not graduating enough engineers and we have a lot of engineering staff in the colleges who are retiring and not being replaced such that areas of expertise are being lost. The US had a huge push in the raw sciences and engineering for the space race and that push is not only over but now we live in a society where many are scared of science and young people are not pursuing it. However while the number of patents is falling in the US, China and India and other countries are picking up the slack.

BTW I think it is a funny that you compare Brittney to Bach as though she represents everything that defines music today as bad pop bubble gum music.

There are more orchestras around the world playing classical music than in any time in history.

More people around the world can listen to music of all different types whenever they want. With 8+ billion people on this planet, new music is being composed all the time. New creative artists can self-publish their work and only need to find an audience large enough to support them outside of the large recording industry.

http://mic.com/articles/90713/9-bri...omposers-who-prove-classical-music-isn-t-dead

It doesn't matter if 90% of the world is listening to music you consider crap, because 10% is still 800+ million people and there are now more people involved in keeping classical and other music alive and well then there were when some of the our historic masterpieces were composed.

I just ordered a pile of music that ranges from piano concertos to alternative rock from the 70's I had never heard of until recently, to recent jazz vocalists. I found out about these recordings on the Internet. I have recordings of almost every piece of well known classical music as well as pop rock. The diversity is seems endless.

Then Roberto includes links to Cellists on YouTube to share with us on this forum and once again the technology of today allows me to learn about something from someone I will never meet and didn't know existed outside of this forum.

The important thing to me is that music is fun, convenient, diverse and sounds great!!