After two years of self flagellation with these wonderful speakers, we got them finely dialed in and subsequently became bored. We called these Stephæn’s Dream Speakers. Our first project together was a pair of speakers with Great Plains Audio 604 drivers. You could say that we are partners in crime. Introduction by Pete Riggle: Over the past half dozen years Stephæn Harrell and I have drifted into an unhealthy relationship in which we reinforce each other’s audiophile involvement. We had major room probs that year, squeezing a speaker for a 3000 seat theater into a small showroom, but we did it.A dyslexic man walks into a bra … or how I got sucked intoĪnother speaker building adventure with my friend, Pete. Here's a vid of the WE M2 at Munich HighEnd. Not for the AK thrift shop and trashpick crowd unless one gets REALLY lucky.ever more unlikely in the look it up on the iPhone era.īeing a man of the people, I settle for ALTEC, but I know that the Western Electric Mirrophonic is the real stuff. Yeah the price is nuts but there is BIG money chasing this stuff. I have never heard more amazing HF than out of that driver on a good liorn like the 24A./ I have heard triangles and saxophones sound totally freaking REAL and in the room to a scary, totally caught off guard degree. An RCA engineer I know told me that they were adjusted for minimum group delay under this condition.in 1934! The rolloff on the 594 approaches the theoretical perfect maximum output and is controlled within 0.25 dB, so that when a simple 6dB peaking network is placed in the amplifier (one cap), the output is flat to 13k. Also, a mostly unknown feature of that driver is this: All midrange compression drivers exhibit a mass rolloff starting at about 5-6k. I saw an ad for used theater gear in the early 50s and a complete Mirrophonic model 2 system, possibly including the electronics, was listed for what the inflation calculator put at near a quarter million bucks!

These mainly went into large fancy theaters.

To buy the cobalt used in the pole piece and yoke costs a couple thousand bucks today.

They were only out for two years or so before WE abandoned the theater business. These are far more scarce than 555 drivers. This was part of the second generation WE engineering coup, the Mirrophonic systems. I can look you in the eye and say that the 594A is the BEST compression driver ever made. 18' field coil woofers in open back horn baffles. That video above was the earliest c.1926 12A and 13A horns with 555 drivers, not 594A.ĥ94As went on multicells in proto VOT type systems, 300hz LF cutoff.

Cogent Field Coil Compression Drivers