"Fiesta orange" spaceball for $425??? WTF?

I came across a Federal appellate opinion once where a guy's
conviction was upheld for his participation in the great Philly
Weltron Riot of 1973.

The factual details were unfortunately very, very skimpy, but this
much was plain: a crowd of folks got caught red-handed by Customs
officials trying to loot a bunch of Weltrons at the Philly boat docks,
and this guy had tried to elude capture by tossing his ill-gotten
globe into the Delaware River right as the crowd broke out into a
full-fledged riot.

I would have paid $425 to see that, maybe even $700, but I would not
spend that much on an orange Weltron.

I think their sound sucks. Never loud enough to satisfy, yet they have
the uncanny knack of drowning out conversation in the room no matter
what the volume's set at. I've never understood how they manage such a
feat.



DeserTBoB wrote in message . ..
On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 21:40:03 -0600, "winnard"
wrote:

I've seen them (orange ones) go for 700 bucks. snip

YOIKES! Who woulda thunk? Any value to those competing
"Aqua-somethingoranothers" that were around about the same time? I
remember they were cheaper. Come to think of it, I DO remember chicks
in college having either a spaceball or a Panasonic "all in one"
stereo in their rooms. Maybe it's them who are now cashing in on this
"Weltron fad!" Still, fads are fads, and disappear as quickly as they
appear. Remember the "pet rock?"

Another fad among musicians that rose, peaked, and fell ...Hammond
organs, especially B-3s. The bottom's dropped out of their prices
now, although good Leslie 122s are still worth their weight in
spaceballs. I remember selling a 1961 B-3 I'd restored for almost $8K
a few years ago; same organ now would be lucky to fetch less than half
that now. Reason? Digital poseurs improved to the point where
aspiring band players with half a brain realize they don't have to lug
around all the wood, iron and steel to get "that" sound anymore. The
Leslie speaker, however, is still the key, and good Leslies now can
cost more than a good B-3.

dB

On 6 Nov 2004 07:00:20 -0800, (The
Poodlebutt) wrote:

I think their sound sucks. Never loud enough to satisfy, yet they have
the uncanny knack of drowning out conversation in the room no matter
what the volume's set at. I've never understood how they manage such a
feat. snip

Sounds to me like the usual culprit, lack of any top end and a
depressed upper midrange. This eliminates all the sibilants in the
material, making intelligibility difficult, but making it sound
"loud." Add a little bass, and it become a mash of sound with its
power focused right in the "C" band range of voice intelligibility,
rather than a musical program. That's what drowns out nearby
conversation, since it doesn't take much acoustic power to interfere
with voice intelligibility.

Back in the 1920s, Bell Labs did exhaustive studies on acoustics,
human hearing (conducted by Messrs. Fletcher and Munson, for which the
famous curve is named for) and electronic sound reproduction, which
yielded both the first 33.3 RPM stereophonic disc, as well as the
famous Western Electric 8" driver, the design copied by both Altec and
(in a cheapie version) Jensen. This was a full range driver, intended
to be used in a smallish bass reflex cabinet (of which Western
Electric made thousands) and used a principle found through research,
that being that if frequency response must be truncated, it should be
done equally from both ends of the aural spectrum while maintaining a
flat midrange for the musical program to retain a semblance of
"fidelity" to the listener. This principle was used for decades to
produce some really well sounding small speaker systems and even
portable and table radios (Grundig comes immediately to mind) that has
no "real" bass or treble, but a flat, satisfying midrange.

What sounds like was happening with your Weltron experience is that
there may be heavy exaggerations in various parts of the midrange
spectrum, most probably down below 1 KHz, with some heavily distorted
"mid bass" and a total lack of clean upper midrange or treble. This
gives a "muddy" sound that most audio engineers are familiar with when
their first crossover fails on a speaker system. Although probably
adequate for speech intelligibility, such as the Bell "C" band
spectrum of 300-3K Hz used in North American telephony for at least 80
years, it does nothing to music. Get put on hold by some company with
"music on hold" sometime, and this becomes all too apparant; the music
can actually be annoying rather than entertaining. Turning up the
gain just makes it even more annoying, not better.

Many Japanese portables came off just the other way, being too bright
with nothing on the bottom to counterbalance it. In about '79, I
bought a mono Sanyo portable for use in my office. One selling point
was that it actually had a separate tweeter to go with that
Mylar-domed 4" "woofer." "Better," right"? WRONG! This thing was
annoyingly bright, with overaccentuation of sibilants over any
satisfying lower midrange, and of course, no bass at all. Even
cassettes of that period sounded "thin", until you turned the crude
"tone control" down about half way. Then, it was bearable...somewhat.
Of course, all portables share on thing...excessive odd-ordered
harmonic distortion...which makes higher level listening annoying,
anyway. I replaced the Sanyo quickly with a larger Grundig, which had
the best sound from any portable that I've heard to date...clean, no
real bass, but no real top end, either...just a nice, flat and clean
midrange. Thus, the Grundig proved Bell Labs' thesis true...you can
get away without the extremities of the spectrum, but it had better be
clean AND flat.

dB

On 6 Nov 2004 07:00:20 -0800, (The
Poodlebutt) wrote:

I think their sound sucks. Never loud enough to satisfy, yet they have
the uncanny knack of drowning out conversation in the room no matter
what the volume's set at. I've never understood how they manage such a
feat. snip

Further inspection of pictures of the "spaceball" confirms a design
flaw I mentioned previously...that being, poor upper frequency
production, but now I can plainly see the cause...a misdesigned
speaker grille!

Look at them...just a plastic disk with a few holes in a star pattern.
And, students of physics, what would that be? An ACOUSTIC
TRANSFORMER! Remember back when telephones were telephones, and the
transmitter and receiver contained somewhat similar arrays of small
holes? Voila, you've just discovered what Bell Labs discovered in the
1920s, the acoustic impedance transformer, which has much the same
effect as the exponential horn, but done in an entirely different way.
If you pull up the "circuit description" papers for AT&T's various
handsets over the years, you'll see where this array of holes acts as
an acoustic impedance transformer that matches the relatively high
acoustomechanical impedance of the carbon transmitter to the low
impedance of the air surrounding the speaker's voice. The receiver
works in reverse, with far less holes, due to the fairly closed
environment reaching the listener's ear canal. It was found, during
the many experiments done at the Labs in that period of 1910-1940,
that such an array will increase the efficiency of a driver or a
microphone by transforming low pressure gradient changes of free
atmosphere into high gradient changes in a closed environment, where
they'd better work an electromechnical device with a relatively high
mechanical impedance, such as a carbon transmitter. The reverse is
true on the receive end. Those with any audio smarts will remember
that Jim Lansing used these same acoustic transformers on some of his
horn designs, notably the conical horns, to increase efficiency and
aid in boosting dispersion at higher frequencies. One caveat of this
device is that it, like a magnetic core electrical transformer, places
a definite limit to high frequency response. The Labs found out that
smaller holes, spaced further apart, lowered the cutoff frequency and
sharpened its filter slope characteristic.

Back to the "spaceball." Look at the array of small holes, placed
very far apart. So much for any chance of "top end!" I'm willing to
bet some SERIOUS money that if one were to remove these grilles, the
top end (whatever of it there is) would magically reappear, but would
be highly directional. Thus, a reflective baffle of hard material
would have to be used to "bounce" the high frequency energy out toward
the listening area, due to the clumsy placement of the drivers on the
sides and toward the back of the "spaceball" enclosure. Firing them
against a hard wall would probably work well and would increase
stereophonic separation. Surely, the accessory "spaceball" speakers
would've fared a bit better. The test of the "spaceball's" electronic
worth? Use efficient external high quality loudspeakers connected to
the external speaker jacks, and see what happens. I bet all that
muddled midrange simply disappears.

Much research done in the early days of electroacoustic discovery has
long been forgotten, to the peril of those who design and use such
products. Remember when all thought of improving bass reflex speakers
systems was tossed to the wind when "high power" solid state
amplification became available to the consumer? A rash of "heat sink"
loudspeakers, like the AR-2 and later, Advents, appeared, taking as
much as 20 to 40 times as much power to drive to the same level of,
say, a Klipschorn. "Infinate baffle" became the new marketing
buzzphrase", and it would've continued, save for the fact that ARs and
Advetns sounded like crap and couldn't produce any lifelike musical
dynamics. Enter Messr.s Theile and Small from Australia, who were the
first to quatify bass reflex operating parameters into reliable
mathematical formulae, and thus the bass reflex speaker was reborn,
now into a scientifically reliable transducer, rather than the
empirical "cut and try" designs of Jim Lansing and other who came
before.

All of which proves my point: Smart people learn from the past,
stupid people reinvent the wheel over and over and over again.

I wonder if any "spaceball" owners out there would be willing to
remove their speaker grille and test this? Probably not, but it WOULD
be interesting to read the results.

dB

(The Poodlebutt) wrote in message . com...

I think their sound sucks. Never loud enough to satisfy, yet they have
the uncanny knack of drowning out conversation in the room no matter
what the volume's set at. I've never understood how they manage such a
feat.



Damn straight...most portables suck moose, that's why I sell them off.
The "portability" can be challenged in that once you switch to the
battery power, they don't last long before dragging tapes. You have
to plug them in wherever you go. The only way to really get some use
from a portable, is use Nicad or Nickel Hydride batteries, and get a
good charger.

Too much hassle for 8-tracks. An 8-track deck is like a car- they are
always better with a bigger motor.

The grills on the Spaceball speakers are the speaker mounting mechanism.
Without them the speaker would have no baffle at all.
Your suggestion to use the external jacks and some good speakers would be a
good test. Or one could remove the built-in grills and remove the speakers,
then build an enclosure (.25 cubic foot each?) to mount them in.
Dan 1.5

Subject: "Fiesta orange" spaceball for $425??? WTF?
From: DeserTBoB


I wonder if any "spaceball" owners out there would be willing to
remove their speaker grille and test this? Probably not, but it WOULD
be interesting to read the results.

dB

Subject: "Fiesta orange" spaceball for $425??? WTF?
From: DeserTBoB


I wonder if any "spaceball" owners out there would be willing to
remove their speaker grille and test this? Probably not, but it WOULD
be interesting to read the results.

dB


For cryin'out loud...I thought we all were into the Weltron for the looks,
not the sound. That's all they are good for...lookin' at and conversation
starters at parties... If that's worth 4 and a quarter...I guess that's
what it's worth.

I got a darned nice one (biege) years ago at a flea market for $30. That was
all it was worth to me then and now.

TC8trax