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Wharfedale Speakers


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Quick comment on ASZ: MANY (most? all?) recordings of that piece are compressed, so you don't get a 20Hz tone. The opening organ pedal in a live performance is 16Hz (low C), played through a 32 foot pipe. Since the vast majority of home speakers cannot reproduce that, the engineers compress the sound. On an excellent recording you "may" get 32 Hz but more likely a higher harmonic, like 48. I'm quite sure no vinyl recording has a 16Hz or even 32Hz tone, but maybe one of the resident engineers has a more informed opinion.

Kent

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There was just one recording from England that incorporated the 20 cycle note, at least that was the story at the time. I don't remember the label now. But the bottom end it had was impressive. As you can imagine there was so much bovine scatology floating around at the time and the instrumentation to test out all of this BS just was not available outside of a audio lab. Now I would just put one of my "O" scopes on the output and see just what was going on. Wish I had that old record it would be interesting to check it out. To me the biggest boondoggle was the quadraphonic record. I still have a few of them, all thought the equipment to play them back is long gone. If you remember there where two systems the Quadradisc, otherwise known as Compatible Discrete 4, and SQ (Stereo Quadraphonics) In fact the Warfedale W35's with a pair of W25's where part of the quad system I had at the time. The studio engineers played all kinds of games with what little channel separation there was. The two best recording, which I still have are Santana's Black Magic women, and a full score recording of the 1812 overture, this included the opening choir, and a military brass band prelude. They where apparently never reissued on CD.

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  • 7 years later...
On 3/21/2004 at 4:41 PM, soundminded said:

As I recall, the largest in the series was the floor standing W90. The double enclosure with sand fill between them was designed to damp out all cabinet resonances and I thought it was extremely clever. I've always wondered why nobody else seems to have tried it. As I recall, the W90 was a dual 3 way system, having two 3 way 12 inch systems in the same enclosure. It was their most ambitious effort at that time. Wharfedale was always regarded as a very high quality British manufacturer and their products were distributed by among others, Lafayette Radio and Electronics. Anyone recall their main store in Syosset Long Island or their large branch store on Liberty Avenue in Jamaica Queens? In the 1950s and 1960s these were among the largest retail electronics store outlets in the New York Metropolitan area. Oh how I wish I had saved their large and fascinating catalogues. They sold everything from Audio equipment, to electronics parts, to microscopes and telescopes including their own brand name products. Brings back a lot of memories.

I have fond memories of visiting that Liberty Avenue store in my youth.  Their showroom looked to be as large as an automobile showroom with lots of large windows (at least it seemed that way to a kid).  I remember seeing and hearing a JBL Paragon system there and to a youngster, you can only imagine how impressive that was.  I bought many parts and a couple of kits at that location as well, a KT-135 Exlplor-Air regenerative short wave receiver among them.  Years later, when working for Revox in Syosset, I did get to visit the Syosset store, once arriving in a 1921 Rolls Royce (long story). 

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