How did all those New England Speaker Companies Get Started?

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a little knowledge of some of these New England speaker companies. Got into stereo in the mid 70s in college and lived on the East Coast so Advent and Epicure were big names.

I got (and still have) Genesis. After refoaming them I learned about EPI and picked up a few pair of them (amazing what foam rot does to a price at a garage sale).

As I have read through these pages and the ones at humanspeakers.com I am starting to see people go from AR to Epicure to Genesis and Henry Koss everywhere.

My theory is this all got started in some Boston area school (MIT?) where some guys in the late 50's and early 60's nailed the physics of sound reproduction. Then some enterprizing grad students headed off to make big box speakers. Similar to the Stanford students of the 90s going to start companies in the Bay Area.

So what really happened?

[Guest]

It all started with Edgar Vilchur. He was a Professor at NYU (I think, possibly CCNY) teaching graduate courses in acoustics. He had the concept for the Acoustic Suspension principal. Which is non-obvious and is actually based on thermodynamic principals. He sought and received a patent on the principal.

In his night school classes were two engineers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps Center at Ft. Monmouth, NJ. Henry Kloss and Anton Hoffman. They had a business on the side building speaker enclosures. This was around 1952 or so. At that time most people bought a speaker and stuck it in a box. So they provided boxes. Vilchur told them of his idea, and when they got out of the Army, they pooled their resources and founded Acoustic Research (AR)in Cambridge, Mass. After a few years there was a disagreement between Kloss and the management of AR over the manufacture of speaker cones. They were buying them from an outfit in Chicago. Kloss thought they could do better and wanted to open up his own line for making cones. He apparently lost the argument, so he and Hoffman cashed in their chips, took a license from AR for the Acoustic Suspension patent, and with A man named Lowe, founded KLH. KLH later was sold to Eastern Industries. Kloss wanted to work on a projection TV system, management objected, and Kloss left to found Advent. Meanwhile Winslow Burhoe had worked for AR and designed the 2.5" tweeter used in the AR-4x. He followed Kloss to KLH, and later left to form Epicure Products. Meanwhile Roy Allison, who was director or Research at AR, left to found Allison Acoustics. Genesis is an EPI spinoff. Later Advent changed hands and moved to Newburyport NH, leaving a lot of employees out of work. One of these was Andy Pettit who was the Chief Engineer at Advent. He and several other former Advent folks got some backing and founded Boston. Kloss finished his VideoBeam projection TV and went and founded Cambridge Soundworks. So from AR and Vilchur's patent, we have KLH, Advent, EPI, Allison, Genesis, Boston and Cambridge. There were several others as well, but those are the big names.

The patent was broken by Electro-Voice in 1962, at which time AR and KLH had 50% of the home speaker market.

I would be happy to explain both the patent case, or the Acoustic Suspension principal. Both are a little lengthy. Contact me if you're interested.

[Guest rickcee]

Hi good story. Bose is the only really independant 'new england '? ? How about the dome tweeter ? an AR idea (Patent ) - why KLH had the same cone in every box ? And why Advents original was a kinda combo cone-dome (which worked very well )? ? just curious. RC

[Guest Sean]

Jerry, thanks for taking the time to post all of that info. It was not only great reading, it was very informative and educational as to how / why we have some of the similarities that we do amongst those products. Sean

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[tysontom]

Jerry,

I am curious, what was the source of your information presented here on the history of AR? It is a very interesting sketch of AR's early years.

--Tom Tyson