kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov (Scott Dorsey) (04/17/91)
Somehow I got conned into running a couple of films for the William and Mary Science Fiction Club. They had asked for time in an abandoned auditorium in the Physics building (built in 1964), and asked me to bring equipment to show Hardware Wars and a couple old science fiction films. No problem. I brought my pair of Bauer projectors, a homebrew 10W amplifier (6L6 tubes with a 12AX7 driver stage), and a pair of AR-4X speakers with supertweeters designed by Dr. Leach at Georgia Tech. Not the highest fidelity known to man, but far better than most 16mm prints deserve. I set up the speakers, plugged my Magnavox CD player (with Jung mods) in, and sat back to listen to the music in mono. Clear and sweet, though a bit too reverberant for my tastes, and fiddling with speaker position didn't help all that much. I figured that when the theatre filled up that it would sound a bit better (though due to poor advertising it never did fill up very far). So I set up the projectors and threaded the film and wandered around. In the projection booth, I found a handful of wires hanging from the ceiling. There appeared to have been a PA system of some sort installed at one time, and I was able to trace cables going to speakers, a PA amp (long since gone), two projector positions, and a strange plug in the center of the audience. I did get popping noises when I put my ohmmeter on the speaker lines, and so just out of curiosity I connected the amp output up to it. It was wonderful. It was incredible. I was shocked at how good it was. Not up to live performance standards at all, and the reverberation problem was still there (though now it sounded more like a standing wave problem in the lower midrange). But the quality astonished me. This is a pair of speakers installed in 1964 for PA use, that probably haven't been connected to anything for twenty years. Why do they sound so good? Well, I found myself a ladder and I climbed up to the small balcony above the lectern at the front of the room. And there I saw them behind the huge grilles. Altec-Lansing Voice of the Theatre speakers. Probably the first high fidelity speakers ever made. A couple of local theatres, including the Williamsburg Theatre and the Byrd Theatre in Richmond still use the Altecs which are beautiful-sounding pieces of equipment (and I do heavily recommend the Byrd theatre for their sound quality). But I had never expected to find them in an auditorium intended as a classroom. There's a lot of great old hardware out there that is lying disused because no one knows about it. So what did I do? Well, the first thing I did was clean up the speakers and get the dust out of the horns. The sound improved considerably when this was done. I also resoldered a number of the rather poorly made connections that probably hadn't been touched since the building was constructed. And of course, I showed the film, I had a nice cup of tea, and I wired up the speakers to the 1/4 phone jack by the projectors and left a note about how great they were. Probably no one will use them. Given that the projection booth seemed to have been used as a storage room, probably no one will ever see the note. But just in case someone ever does, the speakers are there in all their aging glory.