What an amazing thread of stuff here! Years before I worked for the BSR "trio" (BSR, ADC and dbx) I worked for ESS (1979-1981). Though the Heil had the potential to be the very best tweeter/midrange in existence, the head honchos at ESS somehow managed to destroy its potential by following ridiculous marketing concepts.
The "private label" business for ESS was huge, but as ESS continually made their product cheaper and cheaper, with speakers arriving at dealers with woofers and passive radiators falling down inside the enclosures and nonsense like that, many retailers basically told ESS to just take a hike. Dealer relations were at an all time low when I joined the company, and despite my efforts and those of others in the sales department, problems persisted.
ESS had a propensity to contstantly raise speaker prices, while cheapening the product. The best-selling "Performance" line went up in price one year, and yet all the cast basket woofers in that lineup were replaced with much cheaper stamped versions. As the new Performance models didn't sound any better than their predecessors (in most cases they actually sounded worse) sales fell off precipitously.
The AMT lineup actually did improve significantly with the "C" model lineup, as the crossover point of the Heil was finally lowered (to eliminate the ridiculously high frequencies the woofer previously had to reproduce) and the Heil was angled upward since, though its horizontal dispersion was outstanding, its vertical dispersion was terrible.
ESS engineers had actually developed a 360 degree Heil that sounded amazing, but again, poor business decisions kept it from ever becoming a reality. Perhaps ESS's biggest blunder was the horrible "Transar" speaker which was claimed to be a "full-frequency" Heil.
In order to sell Transars, dealers had to attend a school to learn how to assemble the speaker (at their own expense, too). Transars were made to order, and had to be paid for in full before assembly. Though it sounded good to actually "custom-build" a speaker for a customer, and place his name on it too, when the parts arrived at the dealer, who then had to assemble the speaker in the customer's home, most of them didn't fit! The required amp for the Transar also emitted a loud hum, and most of these speakers either didn't work, fell apart and/or sounded horrible.
A "new" Transar was built in or around 1981, that had a standard cone-type subwoofer, but when compared to other comparably priced speakers of the day, it suffered badly. Once again, the top management refused to accept that they had a lousy product, and tried to sell it anyway, with very, very poor results.
Mismanagement. bad business decisions, sloppy construction, and ever worsening dealer relations eventually put the company out of business. Certainly no surprise there...
Though I always felt the Heil was the greatest sales story in the business, I never much cared for how it sounded. The considerably less expensive array of drivers in the Dahlquist DQ-10, for example, blew away anything ESS ever made, so the horribly high cost of that "great" Heil, to me at least, was simply not worth it.'' Just as a form of comparison: the parts and cost of manufacturing the "great" Heil in the AMT series was considerably higher than the TOTAL cost of manufacturing a Bose 901!
Business 101 would have told even the worst student, that an overall, well designed speaker with a good Heil simply would have cost too much money. As far as I'm concerned, ESS never made a single speaker that ever sounded any good.
