If you look at my post in "Vintage Radio Shack/Realistic Speakers?" you will see my reply to Tecexec. He wrote me an email that I would like to share. He encouraged me to do so, thank you.
I can't wait to show my friend of over 30 years who lived by me. He had those T-70s and to this day we could never understand who/what/why. If you don't know them or never heard them, they are a true classic. They are the real deal just smooth extended bass, mids, highs. To be honest I don't think people realized how good they were, Nicely musical. I also bought my Mach Ones when he had them, and they were more musical than than the Machs; it could do it all. That was a very elaborate enclosure and I don't think he had a quad core cpu to do the work... he made other classics as well. Here is the letter.
"Thanks for the cordial email. I've been surprise at the reaction to my post. There are far more Radio Shack speaker fans than I realized.
My career was actually with Tandy Electronics, which was a subsidiary of Tandy Corp just as Radio Shack was. We were basically a captive manufacture for Radio Shack. I graduated college in 1973 and came up to Fort Worth via being a store manager for several months waiting for a factory to be completed.
I've had two passions in life: Rock n' Roll (mostly blues oriented---Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Eric Clapton, Freddie King ad naseum). Beatles put that spark in me as it did hundreds and maybe thousands of young men in the 60s. The Viet Nam war ended that career but it did introduce me to electronics. I shifted my passion from music to audio. My opinion was that the speakers were weak link in the audio replication process, just as the microphone is in the audio recording process.
I built my own Eico tube amp and a pair of Electro-voice 12" Tri-axials. I did some calculations from some EV Tech notes. I had a cabinet shop build the cabinets to my plan and Luella---my first set of speakers. They were my main speakers for probably ten years. To shorten a very long story, I read any and everything about speaker design.
Fate is a curious thing. In 1974, The Holmans (Howard and Skip) resigned from Tandy Electronics. Howard had been the technical wiz at Technics and Tandy hired him away. They designed and built a speaker or actually refurburbed an old building used to process cow plasma. Additionally, they designed a state-of-the-art listening room, speaker design lab and anechoic chamber.
About same time, I had met a another speaker designer named Toby Guynn. Toby was a degreed jazz bassist. He had worked for Jack Frazier in Dallas. I assume that were he learned his trade because he was not a degreed engineer. However, Toby open his own place in an old Sinclair gas station. He only had one called the Po' Boy. It was a full range 6" x 9" in a dual slotted ported Helmholtz enclosure. They were in stained particle board (no finish). He sold them for $99 each. He would auditioned them against well known speakers, as such as JBL L-100, Advents et cetera. They would actually sound better with his source material and environment in "A-B".
The Holmans left in fall of 1974 after some political tussels with Tandy Management. The Holmans like to spend money and not make any. I would come over and use the anechoic chamber for my personal designs. I'd work with Toby and buy cabinets and speakers but make my own crossovers. When the Holmans left, they recommended that take over speaker and cabinet design. John Roach, then the newly Vice of Manufacturing and later C.E.O. of Tandy Corp asked if I would take the position. "Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch." with me being Brer Rabbit. Nirvana, Heaven, Zen and so on. Man, I had found my PERFECT job. I kiddingly said: "They pay me to play".
Concurrent to that, Tandy had Allen Selby to take over as the Audio Merchandising Manager. Allen was a Princeton educated engineer. He was more marketing oriented than technical. We made a dynamic team---I your prototypical geek and a sharp, smooth marketing guy. Allen brought very definite but simple idea. Copy expensive product and use Radio Shack's distribution and buyer power to make very good but affordable products. We didn't copy everything, such as the T-100. Allen concept again was simple: build a tower where the tweeter was at ear so you don't need stands. It was my suggestion to use two 8" because one 8" couldn't take the mechanical stress, especially the X-Max (maximum linear excursion). I also offset them to overcome some the lobbing from the baffle effects. Allen wanted front contour control. This was the first speaker that I know of to use a PCB soldered to the speaker terminal. That way we could one of our electronic assemble factory to do a sub-assembly. Tandy produced the PCB in it's PCB factory, the wire and speaker lugs were done by Tandy Wire and Cable.
There became some end fighting and Allen ask John Roach if Sunwood could produce the T-100 to solve the political friction. We got the Optimus-10 order out of the compromise. Sunwood did a decent job. There aesthetics were always better than our because we would spend the tooling dollars to match them. The bass is my design was much deeper and tighter because we used a foam surround and they used treated paper.
The succession of our product design were T-100, Optimus-10, MC-1401 and then the T-70. The T-70 was my brain child. There was a heavy influence from Toby Guynn on the concept. Allen didn't want a automotive speaker in his line. Oddly, an 8" is roughly area the same as a 6" x 9". I had a co-op doing most of the grunt work but did get a really good price on a Sea dome tweeter. The deal was we had to take the whole lot at one time. It was a little difficult to convince management on this because they detested holding raw inventory. What I actually did via John Roach's suggestion is I bought under my engineering budget. Most of my designs use a CTS phenolic ring tweeter. We paid $1.47 for them. We got the Sea dome for not much more. I helped my Richard Machos, my co-op with cross-over. Crossovers are one of my areas of technical expertise.
I have always thought the T-70 and T-300 were the best speakers ever sold by Radio Shack. The T-70 only lasted two catalog: 1981 and 1982. It was replaced by the T-110 made by Sunwood. So, that's the story.
Here's an interesting: http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html. I could not post a Message on AK. If you like to post this, be my guest. A lot of interesting history.
Sincere regards,"
Chris Kline
.
I can't wait to show my friend of over 30 years who lived by me. He had those T-70s and to this day we could never understand who/what/why. If you don't know them or never heard them, they are a true classic. They are the real deal just smooth extended bass, mids, highs. To be honest I don't think people realized how good they were, Nicely musical. I also bought my Mach Ones when he had them, and they were more musical than than the Machs; it could do it all. That was a very elaborate enclosure and I don't think he had a quad core cpu to do the work... he made other classics as well. Here is the letter.
"Thanks for the cordial email. I've been surprise at the reaction to my post. There are far more Radio Shack speaker fans than I realized.
My career was actually with Tandy Electronics, which was a subsidiary of Tandy Corp just as Radio Shack was. We were basically a captive manufacture for Radio Shack. I graduated college in 1973 and came up to Fort Worth via being a store manager for several months waiting for a factory to be completed.
I've had two passions in life: Rock n' Roll (mostly blues oriented---Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Eric Clapton, Freddie King ad naseum). Beatles put that spark in me as it did hundreds and maybe thousands of young men in the 60s. The Viet Nam war ended that career but it did introduce me to electronics. I shifted my passion from music to audio. My opinion was that the speakers were weak link in the audio replication process, just as the microphone is in the audio recording process.
I built my own Eico tube amp and a pair of Electro-voice 12" Tri-axials. I did some calculations from some EV Tech notes. I had a cabinet shop build the cabinets to my plan and Luella---my first set of speakers. They were my main speakers for probably ten years. To shorten a very long story, I read any and everything about speaker design.
Fate is a curious thing. In 1974, The Holmans (Howard and Skip) resigned from Tandy Electronics. Howard had been the technical wiz at Technics and Tandy hired him away. They designed and built a speaker or actually refurburbed an old building used to process cow plasma. Additionally, they designed a state-of-the-art listening room, speaker design lab and anechoic chamber.
About same time, I had met a another speaker designer named Toby Guynn. Toby was a degreed jazz bassist. He had worked for Jack Frazier in Dallas. I assume that were he learned his trade because he was not a degreed engineer. However, Toby open his own place in an old Sinclair gas station. He only had one called the Po' Boy. It was a full range 6" x 9" in a dual slotted ported Helmholtz enclosure. They were in stained particle board (no finish). He sold them for $99 each. He would auditioned them against well known speakers, as such as JBL L-100, Advents et cetera. They would actually sound better with his source material and environment in "A-B".
The Holmans left in fall of 1974 after some political tussels with Tandy Management. The Holmans like to spend money and not make any. I would come over and use the anechoic chamber for my personal designs. I'd work with Toby and buy cabinets and speakers but make my own crossovers. When the Holmans left, they recommended that take over speaker and cabinet design. John Roach, then the newly Vice of Manufacturing and later C.E.O. of Tandy Corp asked if I would take the position. "Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch." with me being Brer Rabbit. Nirvana, Heaven, Zen and so on. Man, I had found my PERFECT job. I kiddingly said: "They pay me to play".
Concurrent to that, Tandy had Allen Selby to take over as the Audio Merchandising Manager. Allen was a Princeton educated engineer. He was more marketing oriented than technical. We made a dynamic team---I your prototypical geek and a sharp, smooth marketing guy. Allen brought very definite but simple idea. Copy expensive product and use Radio Shack's distribution and buyer power to make very good but affordable products. We didn't copy everything, such as the T-100. Allen concept again was simple: build a tower where the tweeter was at ear so you don't need stands. It was my suggestion to use two 8" because one 8" couldn't take the mechanical stress, especially the X-Max (maximum linear excursion). I also offset them to overcome some the lobbing from the baffle effects. Allen wanted front contour control. This was the first speaker that I know of to use a PCB soldered to the speaker terminal. That way we could one of our electronic assemble factory to do a sub-assembly. Tandy produced the PCB in it's PCB factory, the wire and speaker lugs were done by Tandy Wire and Cable.
There became some end fighting and Allen ask John Roach if Sunwood could produce the T-100 to solve the political friction. We got the Optimus-10 order out of the compromise. Sunwood did a decent job. There aesthetics were always better than our because we would spend the tooling dollars to match them. The bass is my design was much deeper and tighter because we used a foam surround and they used treated paper.
The succession of our product design were T-100, Optimus-10, MC-1401 and then the T-70. The T-70 was my brain child. There was a heavy influence from Toby Guynn on the concept. Allen didn't want a automotive speaker in his line. Oddly, an 8" is roughly area the same as a 6" x 9". I had a co-op doing most of the grunt work but did get a really good price on a Sea dome tweeter. The deal was we had to take the whole lot at one time. It was a little difficult to convince management on this because they detested holding raw inventory. What I actually did via John Roach's suggestion is I bought under my engineering budget. Most of my designs use a CTS phenolic ring tweeter. We paid $1.47 for them. We got the Sea dome for not much more. I helped my Richard Machos, my co-op with cross-over. Crossovers are one of my areas of technical expertise.
I have always thought the T-70 and T-300 were the best speakers ever sold by Radio Shack. The T-70 only lasted two catalog: 1981 and 1982. It was replaced by the T-110 made by Sunwood. So, that's the story.
Here's an interesting: http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html. I could not post a Message on AK. If you like to post this, be my guest. A lot of interesting history.
Sincere regards,"
Chris Kline
.
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that my take on the Mach 1s.
