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From The Desk Of The Orange Peels: Futuristic Speakers From The 1940s And How They Shaped The Sound Of Modern Music

OrangePeelsLogoAs any fan of the Food Network knows, a few scrapes from an orange peel adds zest to a dish. San Francisco Bay Area indie-popsters the Orange Peels, according to master chef Allen Clapp, reinvented themselves by inviting more cooks into the kitchen. The result, Sun Moon (Minty Fresh), is a fully collaborative and very tasty effort. Last summer, Peels bassist (and Clapp’s wife) Jill Pries asked the other two band members—guitarist John Moremen and drummer Gabriel Coan—to drop by their Sunnyvale, Calif., home/studio. “It didn’t mean I was happy about it,” says Clapp, grown used to demoing the band’s material before presenting it to the others. “I told her I didn’t have any songs ready.” Clapp will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Orange Peels feature.

FuturisticSpeakers

Clapp: What’s that enormous speaker dwarfing John Lennon? Lemme tell ya …

A couple years ago, I was lucky enough to inherit some really old speakers from a retired engineer at my church. At first, I thought I shouldn’t take them—mostly because the cabinets were enormous: nine cubic feet each! I couldn’t imagine them in my Eichler house, but I said a tentative yes, and then my friend told me a little history about the speakers.

The drivers inside those massive cabinets were famous, and they were made by Altec in the late 1940s. I was very interested all of a sudden. Featuring a honeycomb horn tweeter that protrudes through the center of a 15-inch woofer, they look like some kind of futuristic communication device. They’re Altec 604B monitor speakers, I discovered, and they have a special place in music history.

Turns out, these speakers were used to monitor playback in just about every recording studio in existence between the late 1940s and the late 1970s. A slightly later model was used in the Abbey Road studios, and is visible in many control room photos of the boys and George Martin.

There’s a funny thing that happens when listening to those speakers with recordings made on those speakers—it’s like you are suddenly transported to the place and time the recording took place. Something holographic goes on with the sound reproduction, and you get the sense that this is how that music was meant to sound.

I spent some time and resources upgrading the old crossovers and procuring a low-wattage tube amp to drive them, and the process has taught me more about recording than almost anything that’s ever happened to me. Monitoring recordings on those speakers is just unforgiving—if something doesn’t sound right, those Altec 604s will not tell you lies. That quality also means not everything sounds good on them. Modern recordings—especially over-compressed albums with over-hyped EQ curves—sound terrible on the Altecs. They probably sound terrible on other speakers as well, but the Altecs really reward a natural sounding recording, especially ones that feature interesting ambient spaces.

So here we are in 2013, and I’m listening to music on 65-year-old speakers. This explains so much!

Another photo after the jump.

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