Speakerlab alum
James-
I'm following your thread with great interest. Speakerlab brings back a flood of memories.
I built several Speakerlab kits for personal use and for friends, including a pair of 7s for a good friend (old enough to be my father) I made through our mutual love of music and audio.
Johnny was a retired GM worker who had lost a lot of his high frequency hearing from years in the plant, but not his love for Jazz and Blues. We met when he answered an ad regarding a Dynaco ST-400 amp I was forced to sell, due to being an "impoverished" grad student.
There was a mix-up regarding the sale of the amp. Johnny drove from south of 8 mile in Detroit to my parents' home in Bloomfield Hills, MI, only to be disappointed to learn the amp had been sold. Johnny came with "cash money" in hand expecting the amp to be available. He felt bad; I felt awful. It turned into a blessing for us both.
To assuage my guilt, I offered to build for him the newly introduced Dynaco ST-150 (75w/channel SS). It was a win win. For less money than he was going to pay for the used ST-400, he got a brand new amp to drive his Large Advents. I got the fun of building the latest Dynakit using someone else's money. Johnny personalized it by having the case chromed.
From that moment on we became audio/music buddies. He wouldn't buy so much as a record cleaner without consulting me, while I looked to him for an education about Blues and Jazz. We'd go to audio salons (remember them?) together. We'd go to record stores together.
When I expressed a desire to go to Baker's Keyboard Lounge (Google it) he strongly advised me to never go without him. He didn't like the chances of a white boy alone south of 8 Mile after dark.
Shortly after selling the ST-400 and Bose 901s to fund school, I got the idea to re-assemble a sound system and DJ dances, parties, etc. to fund school.
I ordered 4 Speakerlab SKhorns and persuaded Speakerlab to send them to me with no shipping. They sent me a supply of catalogs (I wish I still had one) to promote their products in exchange for free shipping from Seattle to Detroit.
I knocked down the plywood shipping crates to enclose the backs of the cornerhorns. They still preferred true corners, but the false corners helped a lot. In '76, these were factory built from plywood with the aluminum 350 squawker, EV T-35 tweeter and 8 ohm woofer. They were painted black with the top hat enclosed in hardware cloth to discourage napkins stuffed into the mid-range horn and the disappearance of the Atlas compression driver (both of which happened prior to the hardware cloth).
Johnny loved those SKhorns, which I powered with another Dynakit ST-400 (300W/channel into 4 ohm load presented by two 8 ohm SKhorns/channel). I showed him how little power they needed to peel paint. His ST-150 was more than up to the task.
Ultimately, he sold the guts from his Large Advents and purchased S7s, without enclosures. I helped him convert the empty cabinets to S7s, which gave him the horn sound he loved. Those efficient S7s sounded great with that much clean power.
I'll never forget the day he dropped the needle on David Sanborn's Concrete Boogie to test the newly completed S7s. As he did so, he said, "They say white boy's don't got soul, but this cat do" at which point the unmistakable sound of Sanborn's sax poured from Speakerlab's #2 speaker.
Many hours were spent in Johnny's basement as the professor educated the student. Miles, Trane, Dexter, Art, Sonny, Brubeck, et al, I understood and love to this day. Sun Ra, and a few others, were acquired tastes I never acquired.
Johnny went with me on a few DJ gigs and had a blast. He's been gone for many years now, but the music appreciation degree and the memories remain. Music, which is the reason for audio, is equal opportunity. It cares not for distinctions based on class, ethnicity, religion, age or any other petty categorizations. As Edward Kennedy Ellington said, "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind." The same can be said of people.
The friends I've met through a love of music and the effort to reproduce it are invaluable.
If you already included this I apologize, but did you get your S7s new? Speakerlab will always have a warm place in my heart. Thank you for reminding me.
Neil
