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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: RE: American Made HiFi Electronics & Speakers?? posted by Tom Brennan on January 25, 2009 at 15:26:03:
IIRC, Great Plains purchased the old Altec tooling. Eminence is American as far as I know.
Vandersteen has several patents on the drivers he uses and although he may employ subcontractors to build his drivers, I believe it is no worse than Thiel. These days, it seems virtually impossible to find a speaker manufacturer which doesn't employ voice coils wound by someone else or cones manufactured by someone else. Most so called manufacturers are merely assemblers, purchasing subassemblies from elsewhere.
One manufacturer I spoke to admitted that he believed 95% of the speaker driver production is based in the Orient. A quick glance through older issues of Voice Coil magazine shows that the majority of the manufacturers listed are based in the Orient, the few American ads are usually for machinery or specialized chemicals ( Loctite, for example). In fact, today even European manufacturers are establishing plants in China and I see this in Dynaudio boxes which list China as being a source of their drivers. The same source told me that since NEAR closed their plant ( old Bozak factory) virtually all metal driver cones are from the Orient.
The farming out of manufacture has had some unexpected benefits, however. Chinese manufacture means that manufacturers can use certain glues and chemicals not capable of being cheaply utilized in the US or Europe or Japan. I see this in the SEAS p17 six inch woofer which used what seemed to be a double stick tape kind of glue for the surround to cone. This particular woofer become constantly delaminated, but when the cone subassembly production moved to China, it enabled the company to revert back to good old fashioned cement.
I believe much of the JBL drivers are now built in Taiwan, IIRC. Ever since the Northridge earthquake which ran directly under the JBL factory, they have had to comply with the strict California environmental laws since their grandfather clause no longer applies. After the earthquake the JBL professional recone kits seems to have disappeared for the most part. Replacement parts, once readily available simply disappeared, and the old JBL recone kits were extremely nice, and very complete from dust caps to the glue and the lead out wiring.
One mark of Chinese manufacture is that replacement parts are sometimes much more expensive than replacement drivers. It is interesting to note that Vandersteen will rebuild any driver used in any of his designs from the very first models, from refoaming to replacement of voice coils.
Stu
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Follow Ups
- RE: American Made Speakers - unclestu52 01/25/0922:43:49 01/25/09 (3)
- Chinesse drivers not testing to spec other parts just break. - jkalinow@hotmail.com 06:23:10 01/26/09 (2)
- You raise an interesting point - unclestu52 19:32:21 01/27/09 (1)
- RE: You raise an interesting point - jkalinow@hotmail.com 09:38:47 01/28/09 (0)
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