by Joe Roberts
Reprinted with permission from Sound Practices #8
Like all 20th Century American youth, I was brought up to believe in the inevitability of progress. Over time, I realized that some very worthy concepts and tools disappeared in the marketplace scramble over the decades. You can find good stuff under all those Kraco 8 track players, LED wristwatches, IBM Selectric typewriters, blown out Phase Linear amplifiers, 6 V tube car radios, and Commodore 64 computers down at the town dump. Might even unearth a few directly heated triodes if you dig deep enough.
Some observers call the current interest in vacuum tube technology retro audio, as if to say "aha, nostalgia buffs". True that some of us are history students, but most are just looking for some good tunes in 1995, don't know anything about all that old junk, and often couldn't care less. People who are listening to triode amps proudly consider themselves to be futurists not retro geeks. Triode listeners are not living in the past.
And why should they want to? There is a lot going on in the audio universe right here in 1995. In particular, the tube scene is healthier than it has been for decades, maybe since the rise of the transistor. There is no longer any need to be an antique hound if you're into hollow state. You can build an amp out of triodes and fancy output transformers that came out only this year if you really want to be au courant and whatnot.
After fifteen years of push-pull parallel 6550 amps, audio was certainly ready to take the next step. I admit that reproducing music is an astoundingly difficult feat, but we weren't even getting close with most of the fake rackmount tube amps of the high-end era. Who's fooling who?
Okay, so maybe we haven't come that far since 1992, but at least there's real excitement in the air for a change. People who have been in audio all their lives feel like they're really getting somewhere bringing music home, often just when they were on the verge of giving up the quest, selling the Gold Lion KT-88s in the safe deposit box, and investing the proceeds in a remote control home theater setup.
Perhaps after all the hype and love at first sight about triode amplifiers evaporates and we have a chance to absorb what we're hearing, maybe it will turn out that we really are learning something important about music reproduction in the flux and confusion of the present moment. Maybe in a few years we'll really learn how to use tubes to play music. Hope springs eternal.
What people are calling retro, I call refusing to let a good idea die. A good idea is one we can still learn something from, regardless of vintage. We sure can't go home to the Thirties after twenty years of reading TAS and Stereophile. Just because you use a few classic parts and techniques out of Lee de Forest's attic doesn't mean you're a time traveler. We're headed into the future on a one way track. Ain't no going back.
Yesterday's brilliant solutions become quaint curiosities when they no longer answer the questions that are being asked. New goals and changing technological contexts leave two year old hi-tech wunder products sitting by the curb on trash night. Obsolescence often doesn't have anything to do with user satisfaction or what a user would consider quality. It's usually a business decision, based on cold numbers alone.
Freedom of choice for the mass consumer ultimately boils down to freedom to choose from whatever they're trying to sell you at any given point in time. You can only eat what is on the menu _ unless, of course, you're willing to cook for yourself.
Today we're experiencing a refreshing initiative among audio people to create our own idiosyncratic niche of electronics, based on the best of the past, present, and future. We're moving beyond obsolescence, nostalgia, and the tunnel vision of the mainstream. The synthesis of hindsight and forward thinking we're seeing today is a sign of maturity, experience, and an emergent late 20th c. pragmatism toward our past audio achievements and future audio goals. This surely isn't retro, it never happened before.
ALIVE AND KICKING
The Lowther-Voigt story is one of the great sagas of 20th century audio technology. Their mainstay product, Paul Voigt's twin cone full-range loudspeaker, has been in continuous production, with refinements and changes, for almost fifty years. Today's high tech doesn't last fifty weeks.
No doubt Lowther ran into hard times during the transistor muscle amp era when an ultra high efficiency, limited power handling dainty thing like a Lowther was considered a peculiar prehistoric artifact. Who needs 100 dB efficiency with half kilowatt amps? The merest touch of DC offset on the output of your Ampzilla and your dual-wound Lowther voice coils transform into a puff of expensive grey smoke. Down at the audiophile society, the whizzer cone alone is enough to provoke fits of laughter.
But those who understood the product weren't laughing. Lowther has always enjoyed a very dedicated following and many stayed with the company through the dark ages of the high-powered high-end. This core of Lowther devotees together with determined management kept the company going over the past few dry decades.
Apparently, sales have been on the upswing in recent years with the resurgence of general interest in tube amplification and low power tubes in particular. Lowther currently has a tube amplifier and matching preamp in the works. They are actively expanding their world distribution network. Business is good in the Asian audiomania market, where locals have taken a liking to Lowthers. Like I was saying, it's hard to keep a good idea down. For Lowther, maybe it was just a question of sticking around until the world caught up with them again.
ONE WAY OUT
The appeal of an uncompromising one-way speaker like the Lowther is obvious. No other approach maintains the fundamental wholeness of the you can ruin it. Limited range can sound very satisfying but it has to be limited at the right points. A mini monitor that only goes down t The Lowther drivers escape this conundrum, since they are truly full range devices when appropriately installed. Given that they are intended to be rear horn loaded for the low end, yielding a bass efficiency boost, the high end output is adjusted accordingly. For this reason, you can't just put a Lowther in a bass reflex or on a
It sure would be nice if mechanical simplicity came along with the conceptual simplicity of the single full-range driver, but that's not the way the universe works. Achieving the bandwidth which the Lowther speakers provide in a one-way design takes heavy engineering and careful execution.
The Lowther magnets are incredible, especially on the upstream models. Enthusiast Frank Reps took an old PM6A he was restoring over to a super high tech magnetizing laboratory out in California and they couldn't re-magnetize the unit to factory specs. This feat requires very special and precise Lowther factory procedures. All that magnetic flux is provided to move the cone through a total excursion of 1 mm!
The Lowther drivers have always been hand made and the end result of that fine British craftsmanship comes out looking like a dainty flower with a huge chunk of magnet where the stem should be. At first glance you know that there is nothing else like a Lowther. And it sounds like it looks.
Living with Lowthers is an adventure that benefits from a thoughtful appreciation of and a close personal relationship with the technology at hand. Hartmut said it all in a message on the Internet:
"If anything ever is or was the Bugatti of something then the Lowther drivers are the Bugattis of speakers. In all respects, mind you . . . and not disregarding the Bugatti Owner's Manual suggestion for starting a Bugatti on what the Bugatti might consider a cold day _ nothing complicated, just tap off all the oil and heat it gently on a stove to some recommended temperature . . . and then follow all the other simple instructions and in the end your Bugatti will start if it feels like it."
Beyond the routine care and feeding issues involved in keeping a British hotrod like the Lowther on the road, a bottomless tradition of tweakery grew up around them over the years. Every substance known to man has been smeared on a Lowther cone at some point in time. Start cataloging some of the crazy cabinets designs that Lowther fans have been spinning since the 1930s and you'll realize that you struck one of the main veins of hi-fi tweakery. Five whole issues of SP dedicated entirely to Lowther wouldn't even scratch the surface.
In short, the Lowther is a pure enthusiast's speaker. If you want something you can take to the beach, buy a Bose Wave Machine. For people willing to invest some thought and care in planning and operation, maybe this is it. Lowthers are not for everybody but they are for some of us. You know who you are!
THE CLUB SCENE
Lowther-Voigt developed an interesting sort of distribution system specially tuned to the needs of the hobbyist. On the one hand, Lowther offers a line of finished cabinets for the global retail market, with the 15K$ Opus One at the top of the heap. On the other hand, Lowther services the hobbyist and experimenter market through a network of Lowther "clubs"; enthusiast-run organizations providing drivers, cabinet plans, service, technical assistance, and other forms of emotional and practical support.
Although there was a powerful Lowther cabal among top ranking Stateside hi-fi operatives during the '50s and '60s, it was an extremist fringe scene. After the new generation came in and tubes went out, Lowther vanished from the US market. The way I see it, Lowther, old chaps, you didn't miss any action not being in this market while we were all lusting after Vandersteens and Apogees to go with our Adcom 555s and Krells.
But nowadays with all this triode stuff going on, Lowthers make sense again. With the A series you can get 100 dB sensitivity in a reasonably proportioned box and NFB SE friendly 16 ohm voice coils as a bonus. There ain't nothing like a Lowther but a Lowther, so check out a Lowther if that's what you're after.
That the time is once again ripe for Lowthers was not lost on Mr. Tony Glynn. Tony is a longtime Lowther enthusiast and Oregon Triode Society member who somehow got suckered into selling his prized Acoustas during a move in the early '80s, one of those deals that makes sense at the time but leads to eternal regret and dismay, kind of like that time I "lent" Vinny Gallo one of my Altec 755As for a "few days" three years ago.
The story goes something like this: Tony contacted the factory with the idea of purchasin suggests that a lot of people over the ages thought it was a very good answer too.
You can't accuse me of nostalgia for old British technology, even though I do think some of it is pretty cool. I'm from Philly and I grew up playing stickball not cricket. I'm just looking for a good speaker to use with my tube amps like everybody else. My plan for a better audio future in my living room doesn't rule out giving the classic solutions another shot in a new context. Scholars say that each generation writes its own history, weighing past deeds in light of where they are and what they aspire to accomplish.
In my picture of 20th c. audio, Voigt is a giant and whizzer cones aren't always a joke.