The Cogent horns use field coil compression drivers patterned after the famous RCA 1428 drivers. The high frequency horn is a conical design from The Acoustic Horn company. For the lower frequencies a 10 foot J horn with an exponential flair is used.

This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below Narrators: Stephæn & Pete Riggle Posse actually involved in this project:Far more. See narrative. Part One of Three A dyslexic man walks into a bra … or how I got sucked into another speaker building adventure with my friend, Pete. Introduction by Pete Riggle: Over the past half dozen years Stephæn Harrell and I have drifted into an unhealthy relationship in which we reinforce each other’s audiophile involvement. You could say that we are partners in crime. Our first project together was a pair of speakers with Great Plains Audio 604 drivers. We called these Stephæn’s Dream Speakers. After two years of self flagellation with these wonderful speakers, we got them finely dialed in and subsequently became bored. We sought out another crime to commit. That crime against nature turned out to be the Po’ Boy speakers, which we constructed in 2008. Yes, basically it ate up most of the Saturdays and Wednesday evenings of 2008. Stephæn advised me some time back that we were going to do a 6moons article on the Po’ Boys. I said 'Uh huh,' and we went back to work on the new criminal enterprise. A few weeks ago, Stephæn handed me a sheaf of papers advising me that we had written the article. I said 'Huh?' The sheaf turned out to be a compilation of emails I had written to friends and mentors during construction of the Po’ Boys. The sheaf of papers included callouts for various images. The emails were interspersed with nuggets of wisdom in bold type provided by Stephæn. I liked the nuggets. It is surprising that the compilation of emails, images, and nuggets does indeed tell a pretty good story about what happened. Signs on the Bad Boyz Benevolent Association clubhouse Before moving to our email message log of the Po’ Boy journey, here is a little background. In the fall of 2006 Stephæn and I attended RMAF Denver. One evening we made our way up to the Cogent/Welborne room to hear a pair of all-horn loudspeakers. These turned out to be a project of Rich Drysdale and Steve Schell, the folks behind the Cogent brand name of magnificent compression drivers. We heard a blues singer with a guitar and harmonica sensuously hanging in the dark space of the lowly lit room. The timber and dynamics were most appealing. Like all sonic phenomena, it was basically indescribable. The difference is that this was—in the best sense—more indescribable. We were dazzled. Stephæn and I still talk about it. What a fabulous sound. Later on, friend Ralph Henson who was also in the room when we heard the Cogent system, mentioned that the system was bi-amplified that evening (with Welborne tube amps) using DEQX, a well-respected digital crossover system that allows for digital time alignment. The drivers we were hearing were the Cogent field coil compression drivers which are modern devices inspired by the rare and wonderful RCA 1428 field coil theater compression drivers. Cogent makes a bass driver for use in a bass horn extending down to perhaps 60Hz; and a high-frequency driver for use in a midrange horn extending from 300Hz to above 10kHz. The Cogent drivers are expensive to manufacture. Gorgeous things. I believe I have heard a price of $60,000 for four drivers (two for bass, two for high frequency). About a year ago Rich advised me of a Recession Special Price. It's not too clear in my memory but I think the RSP Rich quoted was $48,000*. The horns with J-shaped bass horns we heard that evening were built by Steve and Rich to Bill Woods' AH! 300 horn design using his cast aluminum throats, 12-petal conical horn concept and logos affixed to the horns (Acoustic Horn). The conical horn has much to recommend it and Bill can sell you these horns and accessories. I’ve heard Bill's horns and full systems and they are good, really good. __________________________ * Correction from the Cogent folks: 'Our list price for the drivers is $15.000/pr for the DS-1428 and $17.000/pr for the DS-1448. $60.000 was a show special asking price for the complete horn/driver system. Our current recession special price for a complete system would be about the same.' Jonathan Weiss , Steve Schell and Rich Drysdale in front of the Cogent-built speakers In 2007 I arrived at RMAF on a mission which my brain had cooked up on the flight to Denver. What if Stephæn and I —way too much work and too boring for one person unassisted; and what is more fun than two friends wielding tools and alcoholic beverages—could build a poor man’s speaker system inspired by the Cogent vision using good (but not too good, financially speaking) drivers? The result came to be known as the Po’ Boys. At RMAF 2007 I immediately headed for the Teres Audio room. Chris Brady, the Teres prime mover, had acquired from Cogent the pair of speakers Stephæn and I had heard in 2006 and had them up and running. With some reserve I hung at the back of the room hoping to find someone to talk with regarding the Po’ Boy idea. About that time I ran into friend Jay Fisher who expressed enthusiasm and buy-in for the Po’ Boy idea. He directed me to Jonathan Weiss of Oswaldsmill Audio. Jonathan went to a table at the back of the room and pulled out something I’d never seen before - an RCA 9584A Theater Driver, a veteran Alnico midrange compression driver used in movie theaters during the middle part of the last century. What a big heavy industrial-looking thing. The diaphragm was phenolic (this is important). Jonathan had collected quite a number of these drivers for use in the Oswaldsmill speakers he now offers for sale. Jonathan advised that these are excellent drivers, with a frequency range extending from 300Hz to above 7000Hz when coupled to the right horn. This is two thirds of the eight most important octaves. Later I learned from Steve Schell and Bill Woods that if you cannot afford the Cogent field coil drivers—or the RCA 1428 field coil drivers (also from the last century) that inspired the Cogent drivers—the midrange driver to have is the RCA 9584A. Shortly after Jonathan had shown me the RCA 9584*, Jay came up with Steve Schell in tow. Besides being one of the two principals in Cogent, Steve is also one of three co-founders of the Lansing Heritage website. Steve is a walking encyclopedia of all things Lansing, Western Electric, Altec, RCA, theater sound and acoustic horns. Steve turned out to be extremely cordial and helpful. Steve consulted repeatedly and most graciously during the design of the Po’ Boys and has a friend Robert living in Australia who had in storage two pairs of the RCA 9854A Theater Drivers he was willing to sell to Jay and me. Now, on to the email log and nuggets of wisdom from Stephæn. ______________________ * Addition from Cogent: The RCA MI-9584 driver came in A, B and C versions and all are similar and well suited to a project like this. The official name of the legendary RCA drivers built from 1937 to 1942 is MI-1428B (13VDC field coil) and MI-1443 (115VDC field coil). Aside from the field voltages they are identical. Never miss a good chance to shut up. March 6, 2008

To understand what Jonathan Weiss, the founder of Oswaldsmill Audio, is doing in the world of sound reproduction — or what the general public refers to as stereo systems — you have to forget what you know. Or what you think you know. That stack of little black boxes connected by wires in your living room? Sorry, but as far as Weiss is concerned, that equipment has more in common with your microwave than anything he plays music on. The tunes you hear when you are on the treadmill, ear buds lodged in your auditory canals? If that noise were a visual, it would be a bad Xerox. “Horrible,” Weiss says.

I have come to see and hear Weiss’s handiwork in his loft in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, which he also uses as a showroom. “This is the shape of our historical progress in the quality of sound reproduction,” he says, drawing a downward slope through the air as he moves toward a set of Imperias, his star speakers. Weiss is a collector of fine old gear and well-made tools, and a visitor who didn’t know his occupation could be forgiven for thinking that the Imperias are a pair of well-maintained Victorian rocket launchers, something salvaged from the set of “Doctor Who.”

“In the ’60s, home audio equipment was starting to go to hell,” Weiss continues, selecting vinyl LP’s to play. (Weiss also makes turntables and tube amplifiers because, frankly, if you have some of the best speakers in the world, what good are they if you are running your music through a cheap needle and lousy transistors?) “In the ’80s, things just literally fell off a cliff.” Or, as he states pointedly on the O.M.A. Web site, “People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.”

I am about to hear it, through the Imperias, which go for $175,000 and are tall like basketball players, each speaker horn cut from solid Pennsylvania black walnut, polished to a vaguely midcentury West Coast finish. Weiss’s playlist includes “Smiley Smile,” by the Beach Boys, a mono recording of Bob Dylan, some Stravinsky conducted by Stravinsky from 1961 and Bobby McFerrin, live, for starters.

If you are into stats, then you will need to know that the range of the Imperia’s vertical array of conical horns is 20hz to 20khz, which covers the entire human audible spectrum. If you are into the history of sound, you will want to know that the Imperia’s midrange speaker uses a Cogent DS1428 field coil compression driver, which is modeled on a vintage RCA component, the MI-1428B. If you are a sound geek, you will go nuts over the sheer size of the rear-loaded subwoofer horn’s neodymium woofer. And even if neodymium is nothing to you, you may find it fascinating that Weiss’s system uses very little power to send the Stravinsky-conducted clarinet sweeping through the Dumbo loft as if it were a searchlight.

Continue reading the main story

But regardless of how much you care about frequency response or energy, when you close your eyes, you don’t so much hear Nina Simone as understand her presence, and to hear Nina Simone so profoundly and beautifully makes you want to cry.

THE POSSIBILITIES OF SOUND first hit Weiss when he was a teenager working at the Mann Bruin Theater in West Los Angeles. One morning, as he swept up popcorn, the projectionist cranked up the soundtrack to “American Gigolo” on the theater’s old-school wooden speakers. “It was a great feeling,” Weiss recalls. “I just wish I could have heard ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ”

Previously Weiss had led a sound-sheltered life. He was born in New York, his mother an abstract painter, his father a mechanical engineer working in insurance sales. His first record was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” played on a Fisher-Price turntable. He moved with his family to Southern California for high school, but returned east to attend Princeton University. His dorm-room stereo? “I refuse to tell you,” he says. “It wasn’t tube. It was a solid state. But Princeton was the first time that I saw really fetishistic stereos.”

After graduating with a degree in international relations, Weiss filled a backpack with philosophy books and roamed Asia for two years. Upon returning to New York, he taught himself filmmaking and eventually directed an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s experimental novel “The Atrocity Exhibition,” an exploration of media and psychology. (Ballard called the film “a poetic masterpiece.”) Meanwhile, Weiss fed a growing fascination with pre-World War II sound reproduction, setting up his expanding collection of vintage sound components in loft after loft. In 1997, he bought Oswald’s Mill, the 18th-century mill and house for which his company is named, in New Tripoli, Pa.

As he and his wife, the photographer Cynthia van Elk, slowly rebuilt the mill’s looted and crumbling living area, Weiss hosted sound tastings — weeklong events that were potlucks of tube amps and preamps, mercury vapor rectifiers and wine. Guests came with tone arms from Germany and Western Electric monitors from the 1940s. Experts mingled with D.I.Y.-ers, RCA’s “Radiotron Designer’s Handbook” as their field guide.

Newsletter Sign Up

Continue reading the main story

• Opt out or contact us anytime

For Weiss, the crime of bad sound reproduction is rooted in an intellectual snobbery. “That’s such a huge prejudice, that technology only improves,” he says. “You go to school now maybe to learn acoustic engineering, and the idea that people in the 1930s could ever have known more than you know, that’s just too much.”

Weiss was producing his first speakers when, in 2007, the photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn requested a pair. About eight months later, Weiss arrived at Corbijn’s place in Amsterdam with two elegant, horn-topped wooden pyramids, which he had named the AC1. Corbijn, for the record, takes no credit for the AC1’s creation, just pleasure. “They are so fulfilling,” he says. And they are big. “When people go to Steinway,” Weiss points out, “they don’t say, ‘I’d like one of your grand pianos, but do you have a really small grand piano?’ ”

In a sense, Oswaldsmill Audio is a proprietor of locally sourced sound engineering — its products are homegrown, the result of Lehigh Valley craftsmanship. The smooth turntables are made from ancient Appalachian slate. The aluminum alloy in the horns is cast by a local foundry, the not-yet-dead industrial legacy of Bethlehem Steel. And the nearby Knoll furniture factory has guaranteed a supply of woodworkers with skills to make the speakers.

“The manufacturing capacity in the area is extremely special,” Weiss says. “Ultimately this has to do with harmonic resonance.”

Field Coil Speakers For Sale

Back in Dumbo, as the sun sets beyond the Manhattan Bridge and the Imperias continue to send music into the room, the range of Weiss’s conversation is as wide as the tonal distance from oboe to bass trombone. Corbijn had told me, “I think that Jonathan is a philosopher,” and it’s true: despite the high price of his spectacular equipment, Weiss directs the listener to a higher plane that’s cheap, or even free. “It’s a physical thing — sound and harmonics,” he says. “It’s a deeply spiritual thing. It’s not just playing your Jascha Heifetz and your ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’ There’s a whole other layer to this.” As he speaks, he carefully adjusts a stylus on a groove. “People listen to music constantly,” he says, “and because they do, they have lost the ability to listen.”