Western Electric 1928 - How far have we come in the last 100 years?

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will do but for now, google Yamaha JA6001 or JA6002 and JA5001 (favorite bigass widerange stand-alone OB driver) and the hifilit.com for the University or atlas re-entrant horn. All available off ebay and elsewhere. Yamaha woofs and 85Hz horns run fullrange to 5kHz. In parallel but with separate amps for sensitivity reasons..Yamaha=101db to 35 Hz ans Re-entrants down to 85Hz with passive KEF 120Hz lo-pass 24dB filter. Selenium ST320 ring tweet. All cheap, used. Got Tympani1-ds and Shahinian obelisks and IMF and RADFORD big TLs also set-up Sometimes 2-3 systems at once just to dial-in the preferred flavor of the moment. Never tried to get just one set-up to do it all. Those JA 5101s have all one might want from about 50-5khz with even a small open baffle. There's a lot to be said for those 3 1/2 suare feet of coherent hi-eff sweetness . Dynamics of a horn with equivalent mouth diameter but without the depth handicap.Kinda like having a wide range EV Patrician 30" for most of the musical spectrum.
 
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OK, that crazy Yamaha is new to me. A wild looking driver, for sure.
Re-entrant horns I know and they all sound dreadful on music. Can't say I've ever used one 30" in diameter tho. How did you get it to sound good?
 

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Here's a very rare WE theater sound sign from the Silbatone Collection. Totally insane mid-1930s graphics!

Colors are dark blue and orange and all of the characters are deeply embossed and filled with paint.

I like the way the reflection of MIRROPHONIC reads as MIIBIbHOZIC which looks like nonsense Cyrillic!:D
 

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Thought you all might find this interesting. It's from an interview with Laurence Dickie, who worked on the B&W Nautilus speakers and then founded Vivid Audio. I find it surprising because I believe he's from the objective/scientific/measurement oriented camp. Apologies if it's a repost.

Best system ever heard in you life?

After we had launched the G1 Giya in Seoul I was taken to visit a Mr Cheung who has one of the most impressive collections of Western Electric equipment in the world. He played me a cinema system with dual 18”s on W-horns and twin 594 compression drivers on a multicell horn, all field coils and all driven by the original racks and a dCS front end. I have to admit I was blown away. The music was full of character but just came out and enveloped you. Truly amazing.
 
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I went to see the Wizard of Oz last night for its 80th anniversary. The sound was rather good.

That lead me wondering what type of system would the Wizard have played over in 1939? By then the big WE horns would have been gone, right? But Altec and their big systems that became VOTT didn't yet exist. What was a standard cinema system of 1939? I've seen RCA systems from 1941, but don't know anything about the systems between the very first and the 1940s. Basically, the 1930s.
 
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