| |
How Sensurround put me through College
|
Read more
at
in70mm.com
The 70mm Newsletter
|
Written
by: Greg Battas |
Date:
15 April 2007 |
Illustration
from Audio magazine, April 1975
I was in college in the mid 80's and I heard that Universal was trying to
get rid of their old
Sensurround equipment. I found a VP at Universal (in finance I think)
named Clark Stewart who
told me that they had leased the equipment to the theaters and after the
4 movies had pulled it
out and put it in moving and storage companies in each city. Clark was
trying to sell them to
theaters and that was a dead end. I got an inventory list from him and I
went to my college
library (before the days of the internet) and got yellow pages for each
city. I started cold
calling pro audio companies in each city and sold about 600 speakers and
200 amplifiers all over
the US. In the beginning I was paying $75 per speaker and 200 per
amplifier and in the end I
was down to $25 and 150. Some of the amps were BGW750s and some were Cerwin Vegas - the CV's
didn't sell for as much. The speakers should have been worth 500 each
but since the buyer had
to do a lot of the work I sold them for 175 each and 300 for the amps.
The buyer would go to a
moving and storage location who would uncrate them and the buyer could
pop them with an ohmmeter
to see if they still worked then he would take them home. There were
typically sheets of
plywood for the mouth extensions and control boxes that the buyer would
scrap. They would pay
the storage company who would pay all the back storage, send the rest to
Clark and he would cut
me a check. Funny thing is that Universal thought this stuff was gone.
Clark had been selling
a handful of them each year and using the money to keep the storage
bills paid. I paid for
college, bought a car and took a trip to Europe with all this!
|
More
in 70mm reading:
Sensurround
Recreating Sensurround in England
2004
Recreating Sensurround in San Francisco 2006
Sensurround @ the Schauburg
Internet link:
|
Illustration
from Audio magazine, April 1975
There were 3 speaker designs. In the beginning there was a W cabinet and
a scoop design for
corners. I never saw a scoop - I think only a few were built. The W was
a huge double 18"
folded horn. I only saw a handful of these but I had one pair that we
put them into a theater
here in Indianapolis and they did put out a lot of sound. Soon they
found that the w was too
big to fit though some doors so they designed the M which stood for
modular. Funny that I see
people calling them E's. I wonder if they saw the M on it's side or
something. In the
beginning they had a Cerwin Vega 189 driver then they went to the 189E
(for "Earthquake") so maybe
that was it. All my inventory sheets called it an M.
The M was 48" x 48" x 20". It was a folded horn with a single 189E
mounted in a sealed doghouse
(their term) firing backwards. It was build out of 13 ply Baltic birch
(they consumed so much
that Universals purchasing dept had to help Vega buy it I was told. They
were painted dark grey
or near black. The later ones had an extra brace between the doghouse
and the outside of the
cabinet as you looked at the front of the box.
The M had too small a mouth to go down deep. It had to be stacked. A
single M really sounded
awful (I had a dozen or so of these that I used in a PA I owned). In a
large theater install
they would use 12 M cabinets and 3 amplifiers (2 cabs per channel to
create a 4 ohm load). They
would stack 2 in each back corner with a triangular sheet of plywood on
top to create a corner
horn. In front they would stack 2 high by 2 wide (40" by 8 ft mouth) on
each side of the screen
then put a mouth extension on those using 2 sheets of plywood and 2 end
pieces. The drivers
were only rated for 100 watts or so but in the sealed M cabinet they
could handle many times
that. When you removed the side of the doghouse to access the driver you
had to make sure you
got all zillon screws good and tight to seal it back up. If there was an
air leak into the
doghouse you would blow the driver in no time.
|
|
Illustration
from Audio magazine, April 1975
There is some
urban legend about Sensurround - broken bones, falling
ceilings, etc. A little
bit is true. They did have some older theaters complain of plaster
cracking and the Sensurround
manual had instructions in it for how to put a piece of masking tape on
the wall next to an
existing crack with an arrow drawn on it for the end of the crack so you
could see if it was
growing. Kind of comical. Clark told me once that they had to get a
theater opened on very
short notice so they shipped a whole setup by UPS overnight which cost a
fortune.
I have seen on the web people claiming that they put out ludicrous
amounts of sound. By todays
standards they are probably not that amazing. You could do the same
thing with something like
Tom Danley's horns. He is kind of the current
king of folded horns.
So that is what I know. Haven't thought of this stuff in 20 years when
it occurred to me last
night to do a web search to see what was out there. When I finished
college Clark wrote me a
great letter of recommendation and I got a very good job at a computer
maker calling my
Sensurround sales as an "MBA or work equivalent" and now I work for HP.
None of this would have
ever happened without Sensurround. I am building a home theater now and
really wish I had kept
some of the memorabilia like the Sensurround stickers and manuals.
|
|
|
|
Go: back
- top -
back issues
- news index
Updated
28-07-24 |
|
|