Bumping this thread for future technics owners. I have posted about this before, but this is also a proper place to post about these speakers: Mine are the SB-1000 that were the high end of Technics in 1973 and quite expensive at 220,000 yen in 1974, which is about US$6000+ 2012 dollars... each speaker (!!)
They seem to be rare on the internet. For one, people confuse this with the SB-
tenthousand. Second, they weren't sold on the USA.
This speaker is like the SB-501 in concept, but taken to the extreme. Technics pulled out all stops. Basically is a 3 way speaker, but made with a cost-no-object, do-the-best-we-can, attitude.
Woofer is a 15Kg monster with three layer sandwich cone, double spider suspension (for a true pistonic motion) a
huge magnet and a huge coil as well (100mm if i recall correctly). It has a vent in the back so the cone can move freely.
Midrange weights 5Kg, has an immense magnet, paper dome of the same three-layer composite, also has double spider suspension, and has a curious phase plug similar to the one in the SB-501 and other Technics speakers of that era, probably to improve dispersion.
Tweeter weights 1.5Kg and it's a titanium dome of 20um thickness. Also with that funny phase plug.
Crossover uses a huge laminated ferrite e-core inductor for the woofer, frequencies are 500Hz and 5000Hz (textbook design: one decade apart), each driver has a zobel so impedance is kept more controlled. According to Technics the crossover network will only show 0.1% of distortion at the maximum 100W RMS allowable input. It has separate terminals for each driver, which means it's ready for tri-amping. It also uses huge MP capacitors for the mid and tweeter. As i bought the unit, all the capacitors were
kaput and changing them did a dramatic improvement to the sound.
Efficiency is high at at least 90dB for 2.8V
all the way down to 50Hz... i'm currently using a 10W rms/channel Class-A amplifier, with good volume coming out.
Cabinet is a three-layer wood sandwich of about 4cm in width, it is really thick and rigid.
Each speaker weights 52Kg. I have mounted mine on sturdy wheels so i will not have to carry them anymore...
Probably this thing was designed to be matched with the Technics SE-10000 very-high-end (500,000 yen in 1973 -- which would make it over $12000 today) power amplifier and its matching preamp SU-10000, which was also ridiculously expensive.
So in 1973 Technics offerred the very best at...
360000 Yen -- a pair of SB-1000
450000 Yen -- SU-10000 control amp
500000 Yen -- SE-10000 power amp
total would be about 30,000 to 35,000 dollars. Wonder why this was never sold at the 'states.
Look at those distortion figures...
"TECHNICS HIGH TECHNICAL SERIES" ... any clue which other speaker had this marking?