JBL goes 300hz X'over - Finally !

[Mirrophonic Sound System]

The above post contains A typo:"Eighty" should be "Seventy"
as the Wide Range system - which was 300hz crossover
as was the 1936 Mirrophonic - appeared in 1933 not '23.

[Todd W. White]

I just sent the following message to the people in JBL's Cinema Support Department:

You are touting your new 5000-series products as "The world's first true three-way behind-the-screen cinema sound system".

This is NOT true!

The WESTERN ELECTRIC people did this way back in 1931 with their WIDE RANGE cinema speaker systems! These systems utilized four 18" cone loudspeakers on a 4' by 8' baffle, two 15' long, wooden, exponential horns with Western Electric 555W drivers (that had edge-wound aluminum ribbon voice coils, by the way), and a WE Model 596 tweeter.

A picture of the Western Electric WIDE RANGE Theatre Loudspeaker System, with all three speaker types easily seen, can be found here: http://audioheritage.org/images/misc/we/wide-range.jpg

You need to change your ad hype!

Todd W. White
Recipient of the papers of the late audio pioneer, Dr. John K. Hilliard, and, Owner & Webmaster of Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
http://nleinternet.net/alteclansingu...ial/index.html


Here's the pic -



Of course, the picture shown is actually a modified (later) version of the original WIDE RANGE system, but it shows that there WAS a 3-way cinema loudspeaker system LONG before the boys-in-orange decided THEY invented the concept!

I guess Al Gore works for their advertising dept. - after all, who BETTER to have promoting these new. 3-way speakers than the man who invented the Internet?

And....should anyone else wish to send them a little note, you can find the link for it here: http://www.jblpro.com/contact/form_dir.html

The one I sent it to was Cinema Support, but feel free to send it to as many of their other departments as you deem appropriate!

[Mirrophonic Sound System]

Eighty years after Western Electric recognized the superiority
of 300hz crossover for cinema sound, JBL finally comes
to the party !

What can you say; some people are slow learners !

Also, why are they calling this the world's first 3-way cinema speaker
when the Western Electric Wide Range was 3-Way 80 years ago ?

Looks like they didn't look far enough back in history
before opening their ignorant trap !

http://www.jblpro.com/pages/cinema/5000.htm

[Mirrophonic Sound System]

And what about that 200-WATT 3"-throat compression driver they
are using ? A 200 Watt compression driver !! That rolls off
at 2khz !

So we have an MF crossover smack in the most aurally
sensitive portion of the midrange.

Once again JBL have traded fidelity for ear-bleeding
power handling levels.

They're still making some truly awful speakers

[Todd W. White]

That's why I call them <font size="8">J</font>ust <font size="8">B</font>ig and <font size="8">L</font>oud!

It doesn't matter to them how GOOD it sounds, as long as it is <font size="8">LOUD!</font>

Oh well, like they used to say in vaudeville, "If you can't be GOOD, be LOUD!"

[Mirrophonic Sound System]

The reason us audiophiles like pre-1970 classic
movie speakers like the A7 & A4 is because they
followed Western Electric engineering closely and
have NO MIDRANGE CROSSOVER (the JBL 5000 X'overs are
300 & 2.5k Hz). I also like horn-loaded
bass as once you have tried this, there is no going
back. Though I will grant the movie suppliers that
limited space behind screens does not often allow
for good LF horn design - which would mean having
a horn length of around 10'! Though I am starting
construction of home bass horns of just this caliber!

[Don McR]

That is actually not true. The engineering that was the core of the Altec Lansing product line came from Lansing Manufacturing and not Western Electric. While Altec had full rights to design and build anything that had been in WE's product line prior to the 1938 consent decree, they chose not to do so. Instead, virtually all of the driver and horn designs descended from Lansing Manufacturing's product line. The 802 and 288 drivers were evolutionary developments of the LMCo 801 and 287. The 515 similarly descended from the LMCo 415. The muliticells descended from the LMCo Shearer Horn as did Altec's first bass horns.

It is true that the LMCo designs drew heavily on the engineering pioneered by W.E. However, it is not fair to state that the Altec product line was a direct continuation of W.E. engineering. Even the Mirrorphonic system you cite was not based on W.E.'s own concept, but rather that established by the Shearer team.

[Todd W. White]

Wrong, Don.

The Mirrorphonic system came out in 1933, BEFORE the Shearer system was even conceived! The Shearer system came out in 1936-7.

After WE introduced the Mirrorphonic (they built some, too), MGM wanted them for their theatres. But WE was in a battle with the US gov't, and could not produce very many.

After waiting for over a year for WE to deliver their order, Doug Shearer got impatient, and assigned to John K. Hilliard, his assistant, the task of designing, developing, building, and delivering similar, if not better, systems themselves for their own theatres.

The main team Hilliard assembled included himself, Harry Stephens (later of Stephens Tru-Sonic), who did the drafting, Harry F. Olson (of RCA), who did the bass bins for an existing Lansing woofer (no one knows for sure who designed it), Dr. Blackburn did the horn driver, the multicell's were direct copies of the WE patents, and Jim Lansing and his crew built the thing.

Hilliard and his team improved the Mirrorphonic in several key areas, and had Lansing build them for the MGM-owned theatres.

THE POINT, THOUGH, THIS: The foundational work for all of the engineering, design, & manufacture of the Shearer system clearly came from WE's previous work!

Had WE not first edge-wound voicecoils (something JBL later claimed Jim Lansing was the first to do), for example, they would not have been able to build compression drivers. The same is true for the multicell's - everything was based on what WE had already done.

Technically, the designs were the intellectual property of MGM, but I recall someone saying once that they allowed Lansing to sell them himself, too, because he had been such a big help in getting the systems assembled and ready to deliver to the theatres.

After MGM outfitted their theatres, Lansing had no one to sell to. Besides, he was involved in at least one, perhaps more, lawsuit about the patented products that All Technical Products Company had purchased sole rights to, so he was hurting financially.

By the time the All Technical Products Company began running out of parts, George Carrington's friend, John Hilliard, suggested they buy out Lansing, who by then was technically bankrupt - he had no sales by then - the only steady customer he had was for a small 4" speaker that was going into table model radios built by a manufacturer in Chicago. This ended the lawsuits, and gave Lansing the solvency he needed.

Of course, Hilliard redesigned the systems and components Lansing had formerly built for MGM, and, since WE had authorized Carrington & Co. to build anything that WE had patented under the consent decree, patent infringements became a moot point. Out of this work came the 288, 515, etc., and the rest, as they say, is history.

You are also only partially correct in your other statement - while Altec Lansing DID choose not to build CERTAIN things that came from the WE loudspeaker line, they DID build some of them.

The most famous would be the 755 speaker - this was a WE design.

Then there was the 31 & 32 horns - they were WE designs, too.

Then there was the famous 728 woofer (12"), and also the 12" with the phenolic cone (can't remember the model #).

Then, of course, there was the 730 HF driver - Altec kept building that until EV killed them in 1995.

Now, I might let the Model 601 we all know and remember, which used the diaphragm from the 633A "saltshaker" microphone, pass, because that diaphragm was never intended to be used in a loudspeaker, as far as I know.

The idea that the Altec designs are not direct descendants of the WE designs is false...

[Don McR]

No offense, but we've been through this before Todd. See my rebuttal to your post here:

http://java.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.pl...er&r=&session=

In summary, the following timeline tracks the development of cinema loudspeakers:

1927 - Vitaphone system used in the first "talking" motion picture uses the WE 555 based "Voice of Action"
1933 ? W.E. introduces the three way "Wide Range" system illustrated above.
1933 ? W.E. develops the two-way "Fletcher System" for use in stereophonic experiments as a prototype.
1933 - MGM requests W.E. to develop a production loudspeaker based on the Fletcher loudspeaker
1934 - After a year of inaction by W.E., Douglas Shearer gains permission from MGM management to develop their own loudspeaker system. Shearer assembles a team consisting of John Hilliard, Jim Lansing (Blackburn was a Lansing employee), Robert Stephens, and Harry Kimball. This team develops the prototype for the Shearer Horn. Harry Olson was not a part of this team - he just made arrangements to loan an existing RCA bass horn design to the project.
1935 - MGM contracts with W.E. and RCA to manufacture loudspeakers based on the Shearer Horn design. W.E. later markets their version as the Diaphonic, the loudspeaker component of the Mirrophonic cinema sound system (there was no such thing as a Mirrophonic loudspeaker since this term referred to the entire playback system and not just the speakers)

You can find sources for all of these facts in my AA post.

As to other factual errors, Lansing was involved in the MGM contracts for Shearer systems. He supplied all of the drivers used in the RCA contract. He also supplied dozens of theater companies with Shearer Horns under his own brand, in particular the sound system for the world famous Chinese Theater in Hollywood. He even sold Shearer Horns as far a field as Australia.

I have never seen any evidence of litigation between All Technical Services and Lansing Manufacturing. The only litigation I am aware of involved W.E. and their patent for the circumferential phase plug. Lansing was successful in overturning W.E.?s patent by demonstrating prior art. This happened long before the sale to All Technical Services.

Lansing was selling large scale cinema loudspeakers and Iconics right up to the sale to All Technical Services. His financial problems were more related to cost and production control as opposed to a lack of customers. As Hilliard said in a 1980 interview, MGM was handing Lansing business hand over fist, but Lansing was losing money due to poor management.

My words in my previous post were not well chosen, but I did not mean to imply that Altec never built any WE designs. I am fully aware of the products you listed and you can add the 594 to that list, though numbers were very small. The point I was trying to make was that the vast majority of the Altec product line, including all of the drivers and the majority of horns for the VOTT, descended directly from Lansing Manufacturing. The W.E. product line formed a very small percentage of total Altec sales.

Finally, I stand by my words that ?? it is not fair to state that the Altec product line was a direct continuation of W.E. engineering.? This totally ignores the contributions of Lansing and Blackburn in developing the drivers for which the core Altec product line ?directly? descended. I did not say that these in turn were independent of W.E.?s engineering. Quite the contrary, I specifically said that ?LMCo designs drew heavily on the engineering pioneered by W.E.?

[Mirrophonic Sound System]

I LOVE THIS DEBATE

What is more fun than finding a complete MIRROPHONIC
SOUND SYSTEM in a dark, dusty old closed down movie palace ?
But you must watch out , & nitrate !

Don ends up by saying "LMCo designs drew heavily on
the engineering pioneered by W.E."
So really all this is about nothing.
And what, TECHNOLOGICALLY, did the introduction of the
Shearer bring ? Nothing.
Yet on their website, JBL tries to create something
out of nothing.
Why ? to bolster their pedigree ! Even if it means
bending history - or more precisely, creating something
out of nothing. Because they have NOTHING on W.E.
We've already seen that they will LIE: "World's first
three-way cinema sound system".
They're not the only ones; go to Tannoy's site and
they will tell you that they invented the coaxial !
Both these companies have big outside corporate owners.
Millions of dollars are at stake. The average chump
reading their propaganda will be totally blind to
their falsehoods and distortions.