Altec Lansing Corporation

No, not the movie. The screen.

It's huge, when you get right up to it. You'll notice that it has holes in it. This is to let the sound out.

Behind the screen, you see the movie backwards, and you see where the sound is coming from. If the theater is more than about 20 years old, the sound is probably coming from Altec horn speakers. These have woofer cabinets the size of Porta-Potties, and 4-foot tweeters that look more like space ship weapons. They're mounted high up on platforms, booming out thunder from above. Any made before the end of World War II have electromagnetic field coils. Unless you power-up the tube rectifiers before the show, you've re-invented silent pictures.

Until Altec was dragged down, down, down, ever farther into late-20th-century capitalist Hell, it was the outfit putting the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop, and the whang in the whang a danga ding dang, at your movies. This has never been a business for the faint hearted. Movies cost megabucks, and theater presentation is where producers and exhibitors alike win or lose with the audience. Nobody's going to stand around and let the equipment screw up.

From the beginning of the talkies, one of Altec's several incarnations was there with the technical chops to make it work and keep it working. As the company branched out into broadcasting, recording, public address and "Golden Age" home hi-fi, it was the same - straight-ahead, gimmick-free engineering, designed to specs rather than prices, and supported with extreme professionalism.

Along with JBL (James B. Lansing, who worked at Altec for a time), Altec WAS pro audio.

Yes, you can buy A7s again ($5800 +$300 shipping per speaker, some assembly required).

Back when Jolson told audiences that they hadn't heard nothing yet, they really hadn't. Sound movie technology wasn't much past home radios. RCA, DeForest, et. al. had gotten pretty good at these, but the only way low-power amps and primitive speaker drivers could fill auditoriums with anything resembling audible sound was to use Western Electric PA horns, the World War I "loudspeaking telephones," developed at Bell Labs.

These "snail horns" were outlandish spiral contraptions looking more like giant sea shells. If talking movies were going to be more than a gimmick, music had to sound better than at home, and voices had to be intelligible. Western Electric rather quickly invented the 3-way speaker. It had a 4x18" woofer on a rather inefficient open baffle, a super-efficient double midrange (the snail horns), and a 2x direct-firing tweeter.

You get the idea. They had also invented driver mismatch and time distortion. The midrange sounds in your epic movie had 12 feet farther to go before they could get out into the auditorium, entertain the audience, and make you some money. Forget phase smearing. Try tap shoe sounds coming out of the thing twice! Not good. Dialogue had obvious problems as well. Giving your paying audience a headache is not a highly recommended presentation technique.

American movie speakers would not change fundamentally until the early 1970s, and then only because they had to, when theaters moved into neighborhood shopping malls designed for commerce, not entertainment. This was, by and large, what saved the feature film industry, but of course it doomed large bass horn speakers for many applications. Today, then, your average neighborhood picture-show speakers are nothing remarkable, though they are still well engineered. They are essentially large, direct-radiating woofers in very shallow, ported boxes, with short treble horns. They make up for any loss in efficiency by using ultra-power, solid state amps, up to 1200 watts in some bi-amped systems, and more attention to subwoofers and boom tracks. Other deficiencies are addressed in the design of the electronic crossover. This becomes the make-or-break of the whole system, which is why THX leases out their own. Arguably, despite all the whoop-de-doo new technologies for movie sound, the playback in the standard, non-Dolby, non-THX, neighborhood theater has actually gone downhill.

Stereophonic sound? Demonstrated at Bell Labs in the 20s. Noise reduction? Invented early on, to cut optical hiss. High fidelity? Western Electric triodes in class A single-ended configuration are still widely considered the cleanest devices known. Biamplification? Old hat. Time alignment? Old hat. Multitrack? Old hat. Electrostatic speakers? Patented by Kellogg, 1929. Color? Old hat; ask the Munchkins. Ultra-wide screens? Done in the silent era with three synchronized projectors, just like early Cinerama. Subwoofers and sub-bass tracks? Sensurround, 1974. Dolby? Well, yes, this is a good system, with some clever technical hacks, but still basically a better way of doing optical and magnetic analog sound, and 70s besides. Even the mighty THX is, at core, a set of standards for presentation, plus a radical refinement of analog technology with an increasing number of digital embellishments. If movies sound better, it is because people want them to, and are willing to spend the money, not from any new technical miracles.

Getting back to the Shearer horns, MGM bought 12 of these speakers for its Leow's Theatres. Lansing marketed his own version, under the "Shearer System" name, but bigger and with his typically fanatical attention to craftsmanship. It had two of the big bass horns, sitting side by side, high up in a wooden frame, with large deflector baffles on either side. (These "wings" address the nondirectionality of bass; their absence is one deficiency of "modern" theater speakers.) Far up on top, the multicellular horn fired megasound at the unsuspecting masses. RCA marketed its own version as part of the Photophone system, and Western Electric's was the Diaphone. In Germany, Klangfilm marketed a mammoth straight horn with tweeters, becoming that country's industry standard until after World War II. Later, JBL marketed a fairly similar looking design.

WE and Westrex (Western Electric Export Company) became dominant, and they were eventually dragged into court by people thinking AT&T was quite big enough already. The resulting settlement created Altec. In 1941, Altec bought Lansing out, and he worked for them until 1946. One result of all this was a new movie speaker called "The Voice of the Theatre," the full line of which was introduced in 1945.

The Voice of the Theatre speakers were scaled to auditorium size and dimensions. Huge movie palaces required the mighty A1-X, a bi-amped system with 6x15" woofers, two gigantic bass horns, and 4 compression drivers into a huge, and hugely expensive, multicellular high frequency horn. This thing was ten feet tall and weighed 2300 pounds. Most theaters, though, got by with the ubiquitous A4, and its single, model 210, bass horn. The 210, and with a few modifications the VOTT line in general, became an industry standard for something like 35 years.

With competition from TV, movies had to become bigger and more impressive, and stereo sound became more than a gimmick. By this time, theater chains had been spun off by the studios and were on their own to make it or (increasingly) fail. The bigger ones installed wider screens, more speakers, and impressive racks of tube amps with high power for headroom on explosive sound effects. Years before steppers, and even longer before time code, all manner of devices could be "interlocked," and kept in perfect sync by mechanical selsyns derived from WW II gun aimers.

"Old" 3-projector Cinerama used five channels behind its wider screen, each one a modified A2 with two horns and its own 75-watt Altec amp, plus up to 20 2-way speakers in the surrounds, fed by 70.7 volt lines! Oof! HERE is a wall of sound that Phil Spector never dreamed of! Multichannel synchronized mag hit its ultimate with IMAX, which in its current incarnation is basically 70mm, 15-perf VistaVision, still using 6-track interlocked mag, though digital (on DVD) is coming up fast. This goes to big, custom PA speakers driven by a massive, 12-kW amp stack for plenty of headroom. IMAX and Omnimax sound pretty damn good too. The audience has been listening for quite some time.

For some reason, it is now gospel on the Internet that JBL's were used at Woodstock, but examination of old pictures shows what are clearly Altec horns and huge 4x15" Altec bass bins. These famous "Woodstock Bins" ended up in South Africa, where they helped cause a revolution. In fact the only JBL iron at Woodstock was in the actual 15" bass drivers inside the big cabinets.

Sometimes, as in the case of the legendary A7, Altecs wound up absolutely everywhere. The A7, a smaller bass horn/reflex box crossing over at 800 or 500 Hz to a 4-cell sectoral horn, became pro audio's Model T. It has to be the most recognizable pro speaker ever made. Not necessarily the best sounding, you understand, but certainly the most recognizable. They still turn up in big studios, at gigs, in clubs, and, heavily modified and fussed over, even in DIY audiophile's garages. One sculptor makes a fancy cabinet out of furniture wood. Someone even has a full-size stone picture of this speaker on their grave marker. No wonder the successor company called Altec Lansing Technologies still offers a "legacy" A7 limited edition, for anyone with $6000 per speaker (you can buy them online!).

Pacific's Cinerama Dome, 1960s

Custom installation at the famous Cinerama Dome, Sunset and Vine, Hollywood, CA. A2s, but note the double horns for 180-degree dispersion. The split-surround auditorium here is unusually short and wide, fitting inside a deeply curved screen, and all housed in a true, Bucky-Fuller-style, Geodesic dome. The vertical lines in this original screen were due to its construction out of carefully placed strips, which solved a problem with light bouncing back onto screens with such extreme curves.

The projection booth is long, claustrophobically narrow, and (necessarily) curved. It has Cinerama's three separate boothlets called "Able," "Baker," and "Charlie" (from old World War II radio phonetics), each with its own ports. The side booths at the Dome look a little less claustrophobic than the original Cinerama spec for Able and Charlie, a good thing since all three machines still use operators.

After the Dome's booth was designed, however, Cinerama stopped using this labor-intensive setup, and never installed the equipment. If you saw 3-panel Cinerama in Los Angeles, it wasn't at the Dome. All projection at the Dome was the "new" Cinerama format of single-projector, 70mm anamorphic with additional printer correction for the curved screen and short throw. Of course other 70/35 mag/opt formats could still be shown, using custom projection lenses and some really scary looking aperture plates.

It took some fighting to save the old Dome, but it survives, as part of the new ArcLight Cinema 15-plex, next door to another of Hollywood's more amazing scenes at Amoeba Music. Everything, including the screen and the gear you see here, was ripped out in the remodel, but the GOOD news is that we got a 3-panel setup to go with the standard projector!

Yes, the booth is now what the good Lord and Cinerama, Inc. intended it to be. Looks like the real, funky, Cinerama gear sitting on giant lamphouses, and apparently using platters. The center machine is the snazzy new electronic kind with no intermittent, but the other two look like good ol' oil-squirting maltese-cross Centuries, muy funky but immortal, with the Cinerama 6-perf frame advance, and fitted with the interlocks and Jiggle-O (Gigolo) frame line blurring thing. You want a scary aperture plate? The Gigolo vignettes the sides of the frame slightly, and vibrates to blur the edge, so it can overlap 2% with the adjacent panel and not be twice as bright.

Now keep in mind that 3-strip Cinerama cameras were a cool setup, with their three tiny 27mm lenses the size of human pupils, a HUGE common shutter in FRONT of the lenses, and a 146-degree field to give set dressers and lighting gaffers nightmares. However, if you've ever seen projected 3-strip you know what the registration looks like! No double-pin Mitchell movements here. Yes, there are STILL 3 projectionists on the machines, and they're earning their pay, with hand on the FRAME knob for the whole show!!!!!! Also a sound operator, and a lead engineer/surround operator using an intercom to talk to all of what become three very noisy booths.

Sound? Yes, still interlocked fullcoat mag!!!! No platters here. BIG reels (7500'). You'll know you've just projected a show after mounting, taking down, and rewinding a few of these in your shift. Meanwhile, new JBL speakers replaced the venerable Altecs, and there are now 44 speakers in the surrounds!

Of course, big corporations aren't about to pop for newly struck Cinerama prints, restored equipment, or any of this. It's partially another labor of love, kind of the exhibition version of rebuilding old transmitters. Some people still remember what REAL motion picture presentation looked and sounded like! Financing, therefore, is a bit like making shoestring documentaries, with a little help from the ASC.

The main controversy here is over the screen. The die-hard movie people really wanted another stripped screen, but, alas, this did not happen. Aside from the expense, the problem is that "modern" movie speakers move a lot more air to get the job done than the "archaic" VOTT ever had to. Instant blur on the loud parts. When the revived, 3-strip How The West Was Won screened on the replacement flat screen, it looked great except that you really see the washout around the edges from not having these strips.

Otherwise, this is great stuff!

"Duplex" was, and still is, Altec's trademark for what Tannoy called "Dual Concentric," and Jensen called "Coaxial," though this latter became something of a generic term. Everyone knows the principle. The woofer has a hole in the middle, and out of it comes a concentric horn tweeter using a separate magnet and phase-plug compression diaphragm. Early 604s had a true multicell horn, while later ones had an extended throat, and the several later versions had the Mantaray horn.

That's right. They still make this speaker, 60 years later, and it is far from a curiosity or museum piece. Great Plains Audio bought the tooling for the 604-8K from Altec when it imploded in 1998, and it is marketing an updated version. Iconic, another Altec progeny, has one too. There has been a truly dizzying, almost incomprehensible, series of models, component changes, derivations, modifications, and evolutions. This means that a lot of these rugged and easily reconeable speakers are still in use, and audiophiles can spend hours discussing the finer points of various configurations. It often sounds like the kind of talk we hear about old guitars, and with prices to match.

All of these sound waves came from one original engineering concept. Early interest in this kind of speaker came from its potential for creating a theoretically ideal point source of sound. Stories vary on whose idea it was at Altec Lansing, but one source says Carrington authorized the design and did much of the plan work, while Lansing fabricated the actual parts at his L.A. factory. Everyone does agree that Altec Lansing was first in the industry, with the 12-inch model 601 in 1941, followed by 1943's 15-inch 604 (the dates are a bit hazy in the record).

The original speaker used field coils in the magnets, but two years later it switched to Alnico V, a WW II innovation. The big Alnico magnets were HEAVY. This led to issues with the woofer basket assembly, which was ultimately replaced in the 604-8G with a larger, sturdier, 16" casting. Later versions of the 604 switched to the smaller, more modern, ferrite magnets. The current 604-8H-II uses ferrite V.

The speaker always came with an external dividing network, usually an N-1500 or N-1600 (referring to the crossover point in Hz), though the circuit design of these evolved with every new model of the speaker. Early models were nominally 16 ohms, then switchable 8/16, finally 8 ohm as a new woofer driver was used in the 604G on. This network is typically considered the weak link in the speaker's design. It's a bit rough around the rather high crossover point. Finally a different network was used starting with the 604H, with two level pots instead of just one, and an EQ feature that many people consider to be an improvement. Third parties such as The Mastering Lab and Iconic have also made crossovers for this speaker.

It's been said that one can tell the difference between 70s LPs mixed in JBL studios, and those done on 604s. In fact, this is true. Just ask anyone associated with the old A&M Records. Which was better? You'll never get me to answer. I like them both.

By my time, though, the UREI monitors were becoming the hot setup. This one had a 604-series speaker with an additional woofer, in a big box, and was marketed as a "time-aligned" monitor. Time-alignment became something of a buzz word in pro audio and studio design. The difference was audible, plus you could blast the things on a mix all night and not get tired. This is also about when PA technology shifted to stackable or flyable full-range modules with time-aligned or even Duplex drivers, and very high acoustic power output. These, of course, led to the whole "Engine" vogue and today's continued tendency to have it all in one box.

Ironically, JBL bought UREI in the 80s. Given that Altec was in Chapter 11 by then, that actually isn't so ironic. As for the 604 itself, Great Plains Audio bought the tools and diagrams for its parts, and continued to support the design. Around 2002, the revived pro division of Altec Lansing Technologies resumed manufacture of the speaker, in its new 604-8L version, but this was considered inferior and did not last long. Currently, if you can afford the money for some real pro-grade equipment made in the USA, you can buy a 604 style speaker from either Great Plains Audio or Iconic, the 604-8H-II or 704-8A respectively. Both of these versions definitely continue the Altec design.

Altec 604-type Duplex speakers
(very incomplete)