Audio History

I figured I'd share this because I'm getting ready to sell it ...



It is a 1942 Lansing "Iconic" Two-Way Field Coil Speaker system. The Iconic was the first, successful two-way speaker a ground breaking product in its day. It was widely accepted as the finest speaker available. It was used as a laboratory reference speaker in the labs of NBC, CBS and UCLA. It immediately found acceptance in the movie, phonograph and radio industry as a playback monitor.

This speaker was owned by Meredith Wilson the writer/composer of The Music Man. I salvaged it out of what was left of his home studio. It is, unfortunately, missing it's Field Coil (electromagnet) unit so I have never had the pleasure of hearing it!

I really don't have room to use it even if I could get it working ... luckily, Lansing collectors are mad for this kind of stuff.

I finally did sell the Lansing but before it left my garage I found the new owner a field coil and we hooked it up and played it, powering it from a 1959 Fischer amp.

The speaker probably hadn't been used in 30 or 40 years. For the first five minutes we made a lot of comments like "pretty damn good for the 1940s" ... but it just kept getting better and better. By the time we'd played it for an hour or so it was pretty damn good for a piece of studio gear of ANY age.

I run a system in my studio designed by the man who built the mastering rooms for DTS (the movie sound and surround music lab) ... and this ancient speaker was in THAT sort of ballpark! I find it very interesting that early in the development of almost every technology you find someone who was so far ahead of their time that others often couldn't even begin to appreciate what they were doing. Sometimes I wonder if they knew themselves how good they were. I'm, belatedly, coming to the conclusion that Lansing was one of those guys!

As an audio/studio guy I find this very cool. Thanks for posting.

This is really fascinating.