Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
I read with great interest , the story of the Georgian . I was surprised to read that the Georgian used an 18 in. bass driver .as I had built one back in 1955 while stationed at Keesler AFB . I used EV's plans to do this at the base hobby shop . Electo Voice (EV) used a 15 in. driver , the 15 WK , same as Paul Klipsch used at the time . The EV Patrician , a scaled up Georgian used an 18 in. driver . I had heard somewhere long ago that some Patricians used a PAIR of 18 in. drivers but that may have just been a tall story . The mid range driver in the Georgian was a EV CDP (compound difraction projector) , with both sides of the driver horn loaded . If you have watched the "MASH" TV program you have seen one of these hung from a pole for their PA system but is missing the drivers small front facing horn . The high end was handled by a EV T-35 tweeter . Paul had used a home made mid range horn driven from the rear by an unknown driver . Whether he used the T-35 is also unknown to me . The horn section is a bit complicted to construct and is not for the faint of heart requiring many jigs to assemble . It is indeed identical in construction and layout to the Klipschorn . The back of the driver is in a seaked cavity behind the throat of the horn . This cavity is matched to the 15 in. drivers suspension system to control diaphram travel . Without this sealed cavity the extreamly soft cone suspension could not control cone travel and the speaker would destroy itself instantly . Before I built my Georgian I had built a Carlson enclosure first driven by a University 12 in. tri-ax speaker which was soon replaced by a 15 in. University tri-ax . The Carlson , for those who have never heard of it was a modified ported bass reflex with a difraction tuned exit slot in front . This enclosure , using an Altec Lansing 206AX (not to be confused with Jim Lansing) , was considered at the time to be the second choice for a speaker with the Klipsch first but the Klipsch was out of reach at the time selling for around $600 for an open unfinished cabinet to $800 for a finished cabinet . I was satisfied with the Carlson driven by my updated with Amperex "quiet" tubes MC 60 watt McIntosh with KT-66 output tubes and C-20 preamp using a Rek-o-cut turntable and Pickering arm and cartridge until I made a trip to a hi-fi shop in New Orleans and heard the Georgian and a Patritian . The Carlson was soon sold and I started on the Georgian . I bought EV's complete driver system and crossover . When complete this was indeed music one could live with . We soon discovered a hi-fi shop in Gulfport just a short drive from the base . Paul Klipsch was to put in an appearence there to demonstrate his system . Remember this was before the days of stereo . Two of us went for the demo and we found we were the only two to show up .. Paul was a private pilot and he and his wife had flown into Gulfport in his own Cessna C90 . The demo was very impressive using a McIntosh MC30 watt driver and a Berlant tape deck , the state of the art at the time . He demonstrated a problem he was haviing and had not yet found an answer for . He had recorded some jingling keys and just could not get the system to reproduce the correct sound . The playback just didn't have the overtones of metalic keys sounding more like plastic keys . Since the two of us were the only observers we were invited to the store owners home for dinner with Paul and his wife . Paul could talk 90 miles an hour leaping from one subject to another so fast it was difficult to keep up , an absolutely fantastic person . The Georgian had a lower sharp cut-off frequency typical of horn loaded drivers of a claimed 30 hz but you can feel room pressure changes but no sound from a test record producing 20 hz .A big advantage of a folded corner horn (or any horn) is that it doesn't require a lot of power to get a particular DB level as the coupling to the room is by way of a gradually expanding cross section of horn to better match the speaker impedance to that of the air in the room . Your amplifier just loafs along and never gets into its distortion producing level , ditto the drivers . There was a second corner horn built at the time by Altec Lancing I believe which was about the same size as the Klipschorn but was based on a catanary expansion curve and had a serpintine mid-high range system . Nice to look at and did sound very good tho expensive . , This one only appeared for a short time There is an old saying from back in the 50s that you can't get pipe organ bass from a shoe box and its just as true today as it was way back then .

Summary:
This is another review from long ago in 1966 when I was in my last year at U of H in Houston and working at (now long gone) Audio Center, a high-end audio dealer near the affluent River Oaks area down in the 'Oil Patch'. We had K-Horns, JBL Paragons, AR's, KLH 9 electrostats, Bozak B410's, B5000 Symphonies,Quad electrostats (looked like a model A Ford back seat) and a variety of top end Marantz and Macintosh tube amps/preamps as well as the good AMPEX tape machines made in the old original Redwood City California plant. Anyway...one day a Walter Briscoe, a rather older gentleman with a very thin 40's style mustache and an old 51 Cadillac Fleetwood came in and listened to some our high end-pricey stuff. After a long time listening to all our stuff he calmly said, 'Well, David I was hoping that there might be something newer that would be osmething fun to beuy that would outperform what I already have.....but I dont suppose you have anything that does that. Whew! I didn't quite know what to say. I had never had anyone tell me anything quite like taht in such a matter of fact way. So, I asked him what he had. He told me that they were EV Georgians with 18" woofers and taht they were far gigger and more impressive sounding than anything that we had in the high-end sound room. I asked if it might be possible to see and hear these 'monsters'. He was very nice and said "sure, come on over this evening if you would like. OK...so Walter left and later after closing time, I went over to his 1400 Hermann Drive address, a sort of pricey high rise apartment building in the Rice University area. Walter answered the door and invited me in.

Inside the place had large stacks of papers and journals on different tables and on the floor and just about everywhere. He said that he was a CPA, and all this was end of the year stuff for his largest client. It was really a mess.
After that his maid came out and offered us a drink. Walt said I am having a steak cooked very rare, would you like for her to make one for you too? I looked around, thinking I would really rather get-the-hell outa here, but I thought he might be offended and maybe he would later buy something big so I accepted the offer.

Looking in the two perfect corners along the long wall there were two enormous flat black utility monster speaker systems. He went over to his two old McIntosh MC-30 amps with a rather older version of the Mcintosh C-20 preamp (without the removeable end-caps), and he said what would youlike to hear. I said, Oh, I brought the Reiner 'Also Sprach...' with me and a tape of Dixieland from the 'Speakeasy' recorded live. First he fired up the old Thorens TD124 and played the Reiner using an ADC10E cartridge.

The sound field produced was deep and rich with powerful thrusts of lush low end frantically vibrating my pants legs and my entire body. A really mighty giant of an image came blowing out with the well over 110 DB + effortless crescendo of the intro of the first movement. Wow! this is really a super high efficency system. Later he played the Dixieland/Speakeasy master tape that I had and it was very dynamic and 'punchy' sounding. I could feel the enourmous impact of the drummer slaping his foot on the bass drum so forcefully in my belly that I would actually wait a few moments till it got quieter to take a another bite of steak. (Mine was a Porter-house and very pricey).

After a couple of hours of being completely amazed and knocked-out by these ugly giants, he shut them down and I went over to get a close look at these mammoths. The lower unit was...for-all-the-world... an identical shape to the utility Klipschorns we had on the right channel back at the store. The mid range was a rather large dark grey fiberglass thing with two EV mid range drivers firing down through a 3-4" pipe with the two angled inward slightly and aimed at the back interior of the horn. Yes...this was a retro-reflective type of mid range horn system. The tweeter was a really massive woofer size thing with 'EV T-350' stamped on the ID plate on the back. Walt fired the rig back up, but at low-level and showed me that there were these really awful brown knob L-pads for the mid range and tweeter that were noisy as hell when you adjusted them. He finally got them in a postion where they were making good contact nearly wide open and then played an E. Power Biggs Pipe Organ record with the 'Tocatta and Fugue in D' by Bach on Columbia, and I sat there and felt as much as heard this enormous system absoulutely shake the pre-stressed concrete floor (this was on the 15th or 16th floor as I remember). I thought briefly about what kind of earthquake the neighbors downstairs might have been hearing (or feeling). I asked him if the neighbors downstairs ever complained. He said, "Oh, well...the lady donstairs is 84 years old and she can't hear thunder". I thought...-I'll bet she could feel this 'thunder' though-.

I left that evening deeply impressed with what I had heard and though..-he is right-...this is a much more impressive system than anything we had at the store. Of course you couldn't have a wife at all with this rig in the living room. But who needs a wife with these things around anyway?

Later on, another time I went back with Bill, the guy from the shop with all the master tapes, and he brought a live master tape recording of a thunderstorm recorded from his back porch the previous spring with 2 Thompson Omega mics (near DC-20KHZ mics with incredible low-end). We listened to this reproduced awesome display of nature practially dumb-struck. It was actually startling and scary like the real thing, especially when lightning struck the neigbors oak tree 3 houses down the street on the tape. That incredible sharp 'CRACK, KA-POW, and boom sound made during that strike invoked the same scary feeling I gotten when I have been caught outside during a real storm. I had heard this recording before and many times since on many other large systems but I have never heard anything else that reproduced the impact and invoked the emotions of danger, death and destruction like this enormous Georgian system did.

Later I found out from people at EV in Buchanan Mich. that the bass horn was actually designed back in the early 50's by Paul Klipsch under a license/contract agreement with EV. The rest of the rig was an all EV design. The enormous EV 18WK woofer had a specially wound 2 ohm coil. This was supposed to be a very low impedance in free air so that when the woofer was placed in the bass-horn with its really small sealed back chamber it would not rise up to more than around 15 or 20 ohms in actual operating conditions over most of the range. What I have trouble understanding is why Klipsch himself never actually produced a 'production-Klipsch' version of this behemoth. The regular Klipschorn was about 20-25% smaller with a 15" woofer. (It sort of smells like cost and limited market were involved in this decision here doesn't it). I would really enjoy hearing from anyone else out there who has ever seen or heard these. I was later told that EV also produced a 15" woofer version of this also called the Georgian which was actually the exact same basshorn as a regular Klipschorn but with the 'sinuses' sealed whereas the Klipschorn 'sinuses' had been 'open' since about 1956 or so.