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16 speaker array,worth anything?

richd860

richd860

Speaker Freak!!!
Subscriber
Found this "speaker" at the local GW.According to some writing on the back,it has 16 speakers @ 4ohms,with an 8 ohm tweeter in parallel.The tweeter is an Olson S297,and not sure what the drivers are.They are all 5 inch drivers,and all appear to be working!!! Also,there is a date of 2-6-63. Anything of value here?

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Oh boy.. the "Sweet Sixteen" was a terrifically disastrous speaker design. In other words, a real P.O.S.


Sure, there was a Popular Electronics article about a project called "The
Sweet 16". It was composed of 16 el-cheapo AM radio speakers in a minimal
box. This was around 1960. I heard one at the time in a local electronics
store, and thought it was some kind of a sonic disaster. It realized every
cliché about trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear etc. that you
ever heard. Later on there was a sequel project called "The Sweet 16+1". It
added a cheap tweeter. This was basically trying to put lipstick on a pig,
polish a turd, you name it.

In the day of "The Sweet 16", remarkably little was generally known about
loudspeakers and loudspeaker systems, compared to what is known today. So,
it can be excused on the grounds of general ignorance. The first problem was
that the speakers the Sweet 16" was made out, of were systematically
low-fi. The article argued that by combining many of them, the random
variations would be evened out. In fact the speaker drivers were
consistently low-fi.

Then there was the problem of the Sweet 16" speaker array itself. When
speakers are placed close together, a variety of complex interactions
result. These tend to add many more frequency response variations on top of
the many that might be present in the individual drivers themselves.

It turns out that there is a similar array that can work, but it has 25
speakers, not 16. It's called a Bessel array N=25, and details relating to
is can be found in some posts I made in the past few months. I recently
built a Bessel Array N=5, and it works, but.

When all is said and done, the Bessel array N=25 does not deliver 25 times
the sound of one of the speakers that it is composed of. Some of the drivers
must be connected with reversed polarity. The performance of about a
quarter of the array is sacrificed to make the rest of the array work
reasonably well. In the final analysis, you end up with a system that
performs pretty much like just one of the drivers if you sit some distance
from it. Close up is still not a pretty picture. However it does get
considerably louder if you apply much more power.
Click to expand...
 
How does it sound to you. That is all that matters. It probably is a POS but It sure is a cool looking and interesting POS. :D
 
Might be a fun project to find some high value, low cost drivers to replace with and see if it actually sounds OK.

Probably won't though.

Either way, neat little speaker.
 
I'da bought it, but I can be indulged my idiosyncrasies.

Luvin' that cloth covered wire...
 
You never said what you paid... it might be worth it, just for the vintage grill cloth. A piece that size could easily recover a pair of small speakers. Plus, this thing might rock as a guitar speaker. It may have some value, other than the obvious "I'm a speaker" value.
 
433 is the EIA code for Cleveland. I don't know anything about Cleveland (and am too lazy to google, now that it's well past Beer O'Clock) so that's the only help that I can offer.

I think that janikphoto and others make a good point. While the primary value in any piece of kit is what it contributes to our listening pleasure, many things have secondary value; which can be turned into primary value by means of sale or barter.

Then there's "having fun tinkering" value. Lots of people have a few AA5 chassis laying around, sans cases - how might that work with one of those?
 
I think that thing is cool! I hope you did not pay much for it though. Like others have said you might be able to find some other use for it or tinkering would be cool. It has other value if it does not sound good to you!
 
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