Speakers To Go
Today I let go of another pair of loudspeakers. Not strictly the largest I've owned (that would be the JBL 2360s), but close — and maybe the best. These ones are pretty special, and they have a cool back-story, which I would like to briefly tell.
Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW) are a famous nexus of the New England audio scene, and helped to make the Blackstone Valley a thriving center of innovation. In the late seventies, Ken Berger and Kenton Forsythe started a company building pro-sound systems. Customers in a business that might be fueled by drugs and bad behavior, but demanding robust speakers that can survive life on the road. The sort of engineering that includes lots of working plywood. Bass bins that (just) fit through a 30" doorway, unlike their JBL competition. Heavy, too: "there are those people who have told me that EAW stands for 'extra added weight'", quips Berger.
EAW brought smart product design together with real technical innovation, and found themselves a home-run hit: the KF850, which became an industry standard.
But starting around the same time they were filling trucks with touring gear, EAW also produced a series of high-powered, high-quality studio monitors. The biggest and best of these was the MS103. Weighing in at 105lbs each and fitted with over a dozen rigging points, these beauties can produce 125dB SPL, fill a decent-sized nightclub, but they're also exceptionally clean and accurate: intended to work as recording studio main monitors. The mid driver (handling around 300 Hz to 4k) is RCF L6-L380, woven carbon-fiber, with a reputation according to the esoteric few that care about these things as among the sweetest midrange units ever made. The high frequency driver is a soft dome in a waveguide; breaking the convention that powerful systems need compression drivers and horns, or that soft domes can't go loud. To work as a studio monitor requires some precision and careful design, so these things come in a mirror-image pair, with dispersion patterns that look pretty good for the 21st century, not just for the late 1990s.
The back-story to my own pair, as I heard it, is: the EAW team had closed an amazing deal, to install the Patriots' new sound system at Gillette Stadium. Building and delivering that contract was a huge undertaking, and involved some very creative logistics, juggling with their touring deals to fill freight planes with gear. As a reward for going above and beyond in the line of duty, the company gave their shipping manager, Jill, some loudspeakers to take home. So she picked a pair of MS103, and a pair of their smaller siblings the MS63, and put together a system for the living room. It must have been quite an experience.
Several years pass. Their grandson inherits these crazy special loudspeakers, and sits them in a garage by Watervliet, not quite sure what to use them for. When he finally put them up for sale, I came across his advert, and picked them up and carried them home. It turns out they are just unreasonably large and extraordinarily heavy. The smaller MS63 will go nicely in my house. But the MS103s are just "extra". So I put them in the basement and waited for a plan to occur.
Two of my kids are nowadays making their lives in Detroit. Which, as you know, is famous for just two things: cars, and music. All sorts of music. Blues, jazz, soul, R&B, Motown, rock, underground hardcore, hip-hop, and techno. Clubs and parties and dancing and players and sound.
So today we loaded these rather special speakers into the back of a car — I worried about the added weight, a bit — and they're off to the Motor City and whatever that will bring. I hope they blow the minds of friendly and happy audiences playing live and recorded tracks of yet-unimagined genres of melody and mode. Vinyl and synths and vocals and strings and horns and bass. It's what these boxes were always meant to do.