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Review NaN of Summary:
This story goes back to January of 1966 to the place where I worked while going to U of H in Houston, TX. The Audio center (now lon-gone) was a high end shop designed to separate the idle rich of Houston's nearby River Oaks from their hastily accumulated Oil patch gains. Charles Lucas, the repr for Bozak at the time brought an elderly sort of plumpish quiet man with a sort of red nose into the sound room and said "David, I would like for you to meet Rudy Bozak". Wow, what a shock. You never knew, in those days, when you would meet an audio pioneer. Rudy seemed to ba a nice sort of reserved older gentleman, but he seemed deeply hurt that we had Klipschorns and JBL Paragons and all sorts of other high end stuff but all we had of his on display was his smaller 5 cu. ft. siongle 12 in. woofer coaxial/2 tweeter model (can't remember the no.) So finally by the end of the day the boss, JRC, "knuckled-under" and place an order for a B410 (sim. to B310) Concert grand system for the sound room to compare and demo against other top-end systems. In about a monthe they arrived. Of course our resident Audio phile type freak, Woody had to be the one to unpack them. These are extremely large and heavy systems at something over 300 lbs. each. The 4 12 inch woofers are the same balck wrinkle paint alnico V model as the woofer that we were all familiar with used on the coaxial frame with 2 tweeters. The woofers were 16 ohms and hooked in parallel and series in the box to end up at 16 ohms again. (This is still in the tail end of the vacuum tube era). The 2 mid ranges were 6 1/2 inch rubber coated aluminum cone alnico V models and the 8 tweeter array use multiuple of the same alnico 3.5 incher used i pairs on the coaxial speaker above. This 2 row 4X4 array was very nicely configured with about a 10 degree spread betwen the top four, all angle slightly up as well about 20 degrees. The bottom row was the same except angled down 20 degrees as sell. The tweeter array end up being a pattern that enscribed a section of a sphere. The cones on the tweeters were black anodized aluminum (no rubber coating on these) From previous tests we new the free air resonance of the woofer was at approx. 36 'c.p.s.' (later HZ) This enormous (almost 24 cubic foot) sealed box was very well made but not as nice as the JBL stuff. It was aheavily brace 3/4 inch plywood with a nice oiled walnut veneer and cream colored synthetic/natural fiber blend grill cloth. We called one of the other guys working ther, Bill and told him they were in and he said he would bring a few master tapes we were familiar with down for comparison. It was one of those deals wher the three of us spent until about 9 o'clock at night comparing these high end speakers to each other. The new Bozaks were very nice in many ways but...they did have an abvious peak in the 50-120HZ range. We all agreed that it was caused by 'mutual coupling' of the 4 woofers being so close together in a box sharing the same enclosed volumn of air. (actually this is the exact same problem you hear from time time even to this day in some 'dives' where large 4 woofer bass guitar amps are being played.) Anyway even with this fairly large 'anomoly' they were still very nice sounding speakers and actually the better performing of our other huge all-out speakers in the sound room on the 1960 RCA Reiner, R. Strauss, Also Sprach Zarusthustra (before 2001 ever came out) which was a truly excellent old RCA red seal LP. On the master tape of the Dixie Land Band recorded at "The Speakeasy" there in Houston they wouldn't even come close to the incredible dynamic range and 'punch' of the K-horns, nor would they even come close to the extreme low frequency performance of the four AR-3 (smallish bookshelf speaker system ) array with 4 Marantz model nine's, (that Woody loved so well), when we played the live master tape of the Julius Reubeka pipe organ piece just simply called 'The Reubeka'. This was one of those incredible pieces recorded with Omega condensor mics that have no low frequency rool off all the way don to barometric pressure (DC). In fact the earlier mics had to be field modified with a tiny hole in the back of the capsule so that Texas thunderstorms wouldn't force the mics to shut completely off because of a barometeric pressure DC offset. Pipe organs are very bright with lots of mechanical transient sounds of traps and baffles opening and closing that are mostly audible only inside the pipe loft. I was there in the loft the night the recording was made on an old Ampex. It was an extremely impressive tape. Only the K-horns and the Altec A-7 would reach the 112 db and higher level of the original but at just below that level the 4 AR-3's were the smoothest most natural sounding other wise. Generally, the B410's were a little on the 'boomy' side but they actually had better high frequency dispersion than any of the others, but the AR-3 tweeters went a little higher. Test in the soundroom the next day with teh measurement equipment pretty much confirmed that the B410 had nothing much above 12,000 and really nothing at all below 36-38 HZ (still very good). and the K-horns did not do much in this room below 32HZ. But on the four AR 3 array, the flourescent light fixtures on the ceiling would rattle at 20 HZ from teh old HP 200 CD oscillator, and if you went all the way into the back of the building 40 feet back behind all the front rooms and offices you could still hear and feel the incredible clean fundamental 20 HZ that the four AR3's were putting out from the 4 Marant model 9's. What an incredible rig! In the weeks that followed hundreds of people heard the same systems. You would be really surpized how many people picked the big Bozak B410s as having the nicest sound. (Especially little old ladies and cowboys, both of which we had plenty of). Something like 60 or 70 % picked the Bozak B410's. We had really trouble understanding this. We always though that if all these had been behind a screen or curtain that the results from the 'walk-ins' would have been VERY different. In those early days most people were still not accustomed to little dog house boxes doing anything like a big speaker system. You migh see a pair of tehse in an estate sale for a pile of money but I can't honestly say I would spend any great deal of money (likey thousands) to buy them.
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