Labours of love First-born loudspeakers
You’ll always remember your first love, your first kiss, your first dog. But with very few exceptions, hi-fi models are transitory things, launched to great fanfare until a year or two later comes a new model which is even better, often correcting flaws that the company only then thinks to point out were present in their wonderful previous model.
But we love hi-fi history, and so we’ve been digging out and unboxing the very earliest efforts in loudspeaker creation from some of the bestknown speaker manufacturers today. For many of these companies, the bonds to the past have been broken in multiple changes of ownership, nationality and location until the brand has become just a brand. Others are still honing their art in buildings a short distance down the road from where their founders first glued five panels to a baffle and declared their first-born loudspeaker ready for sale. It’s nostalgia time!
Wharfedale Bronze (1932)
Wharfedale’s first speaker was built in the cellar of founder Gilbert Briggs’s llkley home in 1932. Strange though it seems to our speaker sensibilities today, the Bronze was purely a drive unit, because radio enthusiasts back then assembled their own cabinets. (This remained so for decades in Australia, where higher import tariffs on finished speakers than on speaker parts meant that building from a kit offered great savings.) The Bronze cost only a couple of quid, about ?40 today (and it’s no use converting to Australian dollars, because we didn’t have any back then).
As the advertisement above left boasted, the box-less Bronze placed first in the Bradford Radio Society’s 1933 competition. The fame! Shortly afterward, it did get housed in a wooden cabinet as an ‘extension’ speaker. Shortly after that came the ‘Nubian’ cabinet speaker in 1934.
But it was a whole decade before Wharfedale marked the first of its real milestones: the invention of the first two-way loudspeaker. In 1945, the company combined a 30cm bass driver with a 25cm full-range ‘treble’ unit, using a crossover
