EV Patrician
"Mr.T" MrT@home wrote in message
u
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
(EV 30W) Impressive in the day, by modern standards it is a
peanut-whistle. Couldn't take much power, and had
virtually no linear stroke at all.
60W continuous IIRC.
That's what I remember.
Of course, power amps with more than 60 watts were very
rare in the days of tubes.
Exactly, It's not the power handling that was important,
it's the max undistorted SPL, and many of those speakers
would leave the now common mini box speakers
for dead.
The best speakers of the day roughly correspond to current accepted practice
for live sound. Since those days, live sound drivers got comparable thermal
and long-throw upgrades, and now make several times as many acoustic watts
in the same size boxes, but significantly deeper and cleaner.
I have a number of friends who used 30W woofers in the
day, some of whom still have working examples to this
day. A good modern 10" driver could out-displace a 30
W. In the day, even EV's later SP-12s were more
practical.
Sure, as amplifiers got bigger, speakers got smaller,
which suited more people and rooms.
Also, the economics were very favorable. Good sound cheaper always sells.
Materials sciences of those days, particularly glues and
insulation, were hardly what they are today.
So true, but some of those speakers weren't bad
considering. The Patrician wouldn't have been my choice
personally, but I'd still have a Tannoy GRF or JBL
Hartsfield :-)
I have a friend who in the 60s and 70s used a pair of Tannoy Monitor Golds
and a 30W modified with an accelerometer fastened to the voice coil, and
inside a servo system that used a Tigersaurus (ca. 200 wpc) for power.
Sounded great until the Tigersaurus slowly cooked the 30W voice coil and it
started to rub. The nonlinear loading of the rubbing made the servo system
emit strange noises, but it still basically worked.
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