You can find the articles reprinted here-scroll down the page.Īt the same time stateside, a Klipschorn design kit appeared from Seattle-based Speakerlab. Wireless World published a three-part series on horn loudspeaker design by Jack Dinsdale in 1974 the series is good basic reading although it has been widely criticized as misleading and full of errors. I don’t know if anyone in the US ever did so.
“Bud” Fried, an early distributor of Quad and Decca in the US, was also part-owner of IMF speakers, and went so far as to sell driver kits and throat-molds so that ambitious DIYers could build their own concrete horns.
UK industry folks who heard the system still cite it as one of the best they’d ever heard. In 1967 he went “go big or go home” with a series of articles in Hi-Fi News on the massive concrete horns he built into his home (you can find the articles here-scrolll down the page). US magazines rarely mentioned horns, but John Crabbe, Editor of the UK Hi-Fi News, had published horn-construction articles in Wireless World in 1958, and in Hi-Fi News in 1962. Across the pond, there were still signs of life for horns, with attention from some unlikely sources. The best-known survivors were the Klipschorn and the JBL Paragon the Paragon was a custom-order item, and K-horns were rarely seen on sales-floors. I wonder if Sarnoff’s political connections were a factor? I digress.Īs previously discussed, by the late ’60’s, horns were almost extinct in American home hi-fi. It’s a funny thing- considering RCA was involved in every aspect of recording and broadcasting from making records to building transmitters and owning radio and TV stations, from being involved in movie sound recording to building and maintaining theater sound systems, it’s amazing that anti-trust actions weren’t taken against RCA, as they were against Western Electric. I’ll gather more information and return to the subject when I have the goods. There’s very little reference material on the RCA stuff, and my personal experience with the gear is nil. Pleading ignorance rarely results in leniency from a judge, but perhaps our readers are more merciful. In response to last issue’s installment, a reader quite accurately pointed out that I’d skipped over RCA’s substantial contribution to the world of theater horn systems.
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