Got 'em!
Turns out there were two pairs of different speakers. One is a fairly convential two-way with a 7" old-style philips woofer (full-range?), and a small cone tweeter, whose maker I can't identify. These are great little acoustic suspension speakers with a very nice sound. THey are a bit shy on bass, but nice and full nonetheless. I've been looking for a pair of small kitchen speakers, and I think these will do the job very nicely.
The other pair is very strange--a design I've never seen before. I think it's the one reffered to in the patent that I linked above. Each cabinet contains basically two two-way speakers, one for each channel (!). They use the same philips drivers for the woofer, and have a nicer dome tweeter. I *think* the way you're supposed to set them up is with one face of each cabinet facing forward, and the other face facing outwards. So in the right speaker, the right channel aims right at you, and the left channel aims at the wall to your right. For the left cabinet, the left channel aims right at you, and the right channel aims to the wall at your left. They are acoustic suspension, like the other smaller ones.
I hooked these weirdos up, and I was actually very impressed. You need to use both A and B speaker outputs from the amp (although I guess you could wire it differently if you wanted to). Their big strong suit is imaging. When I had only A going on the amp, only the forward facing sides were firing, and they sounded very much like the other pair--a nice two-way acoustic suspension speaker. When I added the B output on the amp, the soundstage grew wider and deeper. Especially deeper. The instruments and voices became a little bit bigger, but more firmly localized on the stage. The frequency range of these isn't anything to brag about, since they go about as low as you'd expect, but the imaging and soundstage is pretty awesome.
HOWEVER, as soom as you move out of the sweet spot, it all just falls apart. If you move to the right, for example, you start to hear the left channel coming directly out of the right side of the right speaker, and the imaging gets really messed up. I was listening to Bill Evans Trio live at the Vanguard (a favorite test record of mine because of the double-bass sound and the stereo seperation), and the instruments became schizophrenic--you didn't know where they were coming from, and it was actually very distracting and unenjoyable. So, if you want to settle in your chair in the sweet spot and enjoy yourself for an hour or two, these are great. If you are gonna be moving around and doing things, or if you happen to be sitting off to the side of the sweet spot, they sound pretty terrible. A bizarre design principle, with some big ups and downs. I'm not sure yet how I will integrate these into my system. I can see why no one has heard of these--I suspect the idea of a speaker that only works when you're sitting in one spot didn't go over very well in the marketplace.
So in all, these are clearly well made with quality parts. The cabs are very nice looking with attractive veneer and styling (although the ones I got have a few scuffs etc--nothing that couldn't be fixed with a little steel wool and oil). The straight-forward two-ways are cool little bookshelves that sound great. The weird ones have ups and downs. The ups are quite stunning, the downs are a big downer.
Pics to follow.
Edit: Oh, and another good thing--the drivers have rubber surrounds, so no bothering with refoaming.
