What speakers are these - OOORILL or QOQRILL? 20120724

Mystery

constantly upgrading...
Any idea on what are these speakers?
OOORILL or QOQRILL or ??? :scratch2:

TIA

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Russian white van?

Got nothing.

Hmm... no online information.
I hope they are something of value.
They have pretty good weight and built nicely.
Also, in the back, they have push speaker terminals exactly like ADS speakers with a fuse.
They have port in the lower back.
Here is a pic of back:

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It may be dodrill. That is a surname. My searching got me nowhere with speakers, though.

Still nothing, unless someone thinks the funny letter could be capital D's. Maybe it's a help.

Steve
 
It may be dodrill. That is a surname. My searching got me nowhere with speakers, though.

Still nothing, unless someone thinks the funny letter could be capital D's. Maybe it's a help.

Steve

I believe you are correct and the name belongs to Greg Dodrill of North American Sound. From what I could find his speakers used oval drivers and claimed that they compared favorably with speakers costing thousands more.

Looks like they may have had a retail between $500 and a $1000.
 
Interesting article.
But what happened to the company?
Looks like till 1981, they were doing pretty good.
:scratch2:
 
That is indeed "Dodrill".

Couldn't tell you much about the speakers but they sure look nice. I'd be willing to go give 'em a listen!
 
There are 2 search results for Greg Dodrill on LinkedIn. In the Dallas/FW area. You could always try to reach out to the man himself and get model info/specs, etc. I bet the guy's itching to tell his story.

Looks like he also held a patent for a rear open baffle speaker design for automotive applications. Maybe the birth of car stereos as we know them!?
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4696369.pdf
 
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Those might sound very good. That's a Phillips tweeter like in my Island Sound Image Masters.

There's room in the cabinet for a transmission line for the bass. And don't laugh 6by9s can make some good bass.

I'd sure go give them a listen. Don't expect any resale value if no one has heard of them. You have to get them cheap.
 
I found this:

http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/1981/...corporations_succeeded_during_hard_times.aspx

North American Sound
You might say that Gregg Dodrill has always marched to a different drummer. Or maybe he just hears the drumbeats more clearly than the rest of us.
While Dodrill was growing up in Fort Worth, attending Arlington Heights High School, studying marketing and banking at North Texas State University, working as a salesman for SCM Corporation, getting married and fathering two sons, his world has been dominated by sound.
"I started out like any other stereo buff, " he says, "but it wasn’t long until I discovered that I was different. I kept working my way up to better and better sound systems, until I finally had the best system you could buy anywhere - but that still wasn’t enough. I wanted more, so I started building my own speakers, striving for more perfect designs. "
His quest for audio perfection led him into several off-beat business ventures. His first company, Entertainment Systems of Dallas, operated a sort of "portable disco, " featuring a $15, 000 sound system, a light system, and sometimes a live drummer, which performed at parties for $250 a night.
In 1974, Dodrill went into partnership with a friend in a second company called Beta Sound, Inc. But he decided after a year that he had acted prematurely, turned the business over to his friend, and went back to work on improving speaker designs. In 1976, he launched another company, North American Sound, in the garage of his North Dallas home -and this time he was in business to stay.
In sales volume, the growth of the company has been modest -from $84, 000 in speaker sales in 1976 to a projected $380, 000 for 1981-but that’s exactly the way Dodrill planned it, and exactly the way he intends to keep it. "We’re more goal-oriented toward quality than sales volume, " he says. "We’re selling about 90 speaker pairs a month right now, or about three times what we need to pay our bills, and that’s fine with us. We’ve been approached by several large organizations about handling the bulk of our production, but we’re not interested in get-rich-quick propositions. It’s too easy to go bust in situations like that. "
What Dodrill, 33, and his small staff (two full-time and three part-time employees) are looking for is the kind of slow but sustained growth that will allow North American Sound to keep its quality high while avoiding serious production crunches. But the firm recently moved into newly leased office-warehouse space in Addison and is now in the process of expanding the retail market for its six exclusive speaker system designs, which it builds from scratch. "We’re looking for only about one new top quality retail outlet per month to realize our goal of a 40 per cent annual growth rate in sales over the next three years, " says Dodrill. "What we want to do is pay our own way and grow through retained earnings."
Systems produced by North American Sound are currently being sold by some two dozen stores across the country. They range in price from $300 to $1000, but according to Dodrill, they compare in sound quality to speaker systems costing up to $7000 retail. "Normally, the retail price is about five times the manufacturing cost, " he explains, "so stores that deal with us can sell our $560 speakers for about $1500 and still offer a great value to their customers. "
Dodrill gives credit for the exceptional capabilities of the systems he produces and sells to input he has received from top experts in the field. "I’m in a unique position in that I’ve come in contact with several near-geniuses in audio engineering and have been able to utilize these people’s expertise in our products. That’s how we think we’re able to get 95 per cent of component capability out of our systems. Actually, that’s the reason we’re in business in the first place. "
Dodrill believes his company knows what retailers are looking for in quality stereo systems. The real boom in his sales, he predicts, will come if the buying public learns to look for these same features, instead of judging products by what they read about them. Other speaker manufacturers vehemently dislike Dodrill because he skips the middle steps, and sells his speakers for less. "One of our big problems so far has been credibility, " he says. "People say, ’How can something be that good at such a low price?’ Too many people buy speakers by how they look on paper instead of trusting their ears to determine performance. "
The sound people may then hear is that of a different drummer.
 
They have the striking appearance of a Toby speaker, also a Dallas (Fort Worth) speaker manufacturer. Wonder if they were in cahoots? Interesting...
 

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They have the striking appearance of a Toby speaker, also a Dallas (Fort Worth) speaker manufacturer. Wonder if they were in cahoots? Interesting...

I found a post on Parts-Express discussion forum that claimed exactly that - that the drivers were 'Toby'. Didn't know what that meant.
 
I found a post on Parts-Express discussion forum that claimed exactly that - that the drivers were 'Toby'. Didn't know what that meant.

I bet that was my post. The pictured speakers system is one of his earlier offerings that eventually used the Toby 8" round woofer. This was what was to become the North American Sound Monitor. I still have mine.
 
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They have the striking appearance of a Toby speaker, also a Dallas (Fort Worth) speaker manufacturer. Wonder if they were in cahoots? Interesting...

Yes. Well, cahoots is such a strong word, more like a joint effort. Toby helped in the design and provided drivers, a local furniture company built to their design specifications and finished the cabinets in different veneers, and Gregg assembled and wired the finished products, as well as marketing.
 
I bet that was my post. The pictured speakers system is one of his earlier offerings that eventually used the Toby 8" round woofer. This was what was to become the North American Sound Monitor. I still have mine.

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But now they pretty much serve as speaker stands.
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I the late 80's I ran the manufacturing part of the company North American Sound in Dallas, Texas. The Owner was Greg Dodrill. I also designed their logo (see attached). We manufactured three different speaker systems. The "Monitor", the "Squire" and the "Studio Monitor". The top of the line was the Studio Monitor with the Squire being a step down. The Squire was 46x15x16 with a 12” woofer. The Studio Monitor was a 54x15x20 behemoth that garnered a 15" woofer. Both of these two designs had the same identical vertically mounted midrange horn and a horn tweeter. The biggest seller however was the Monitor. They were 36x13x12. The early monitors also touted a vertically mounted 6”x9” speaker and a dome tweeter. You could also custom order a 48" tall Monitor to be used as back channels in a 4 speaker system. The 6”x9” woofers were Toby's from Ft. Worth. In later days the 6”x9”’s were replaced by 8" speakers. All of these speakers could be custom ordered in Formica (Black, Walnut, Ash) or oiled wood veneer in Walnut or Ash.

If you find these speakers with round grill attachments then they are early models. One of the first things I had to solve when I took over production was the problems with the round speaker attachments. They were prone to popping off the grill if not aligned properly. We switched to a square 3M attachment system that did not have the issue. We had a showroom on Northwest HWY and I35. We had some other stores but I can't remember exactly where. We did have one in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

I left the company when they started having serious money problems and I believe the company finally went under. The speakers shown above (Mystery) are definitely NAS Monitors. I have never seen the "Dodrill" name plate. My only guess is that NAS went under (creditor problems) and Dodrill went back to selling the speakers out of his house on Campbell Road, Dallas (that's where I first bought my pair of Studio Monitors) and branded the speakers with the “Dodrill” logo. However, this is purely speculation on my part.

Just some back story on the speakers. We used to have a showroom where we would put Klipsch and Altec Lansing speakers, among others, and AB them against the NAS speakers. The NAS speakers would put down the others quite easily based on the sonic purity. We had a special switcher built were we could equalize the sound pressure levels so all of the speakers were playing at the same sound level. We would even put a meter on a tripod and set it in front of the buyer to show that efficiency was not a factor. That they were only hearing the difference between the "sound" of each speaker system. The NAS speakers were pretty damn impressive.

We also manufactured "Fuseliers" for John Fuselier. John even designed a Fuselier/Monitor hybrid but as far as I know it never went into production. Or at least it never did before I left the company when they went under. Hope this sheds some light.

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