On Monday 13th Oct, Chris G6HTH gave a great talk on loudspeakers and microphones, their history, development and some of the technologies involved.

To aid his talk, Chris brought many items from his collection, as can be seen on the table above – some items from the earliest developments to modern replacements:

• Horn loudspeaker at the right of the table, with black curved horn that’s mounted on a compact but heavy driver, and adapts the sound emitted to match the free space.
• A Coles 4038 Microphone, shown in the box on the right, surrounded by polystyrene. This ribbon microphone had a label showing its BBC patents, and has a wide, flat frequency response. Heavy, and producing a substantial magnetic field. Shown below is a modern homage to it, a Behringer BV4038 USB-C Microphone, much smaller, but with an “inspired design from a highly popular waffle-iron studio microphone used during 1950s” – and giving excellent response.
• From tiny transducers to gun microphones, subject-isolating mics, lip microphones for capturing only the announcer’s voice, lavalier microphones, fist mics, wind screens a.k.a. ‘Dead Cats’ (shown being held by Chris).
• On the left of the table is a device similar to an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) for projecting sound at volume – used by law enforcement (certainly in the US) for crowd dispersal etc. Find out more with this YouTube video (AOL/Digital Justice).

A great talk! Thanks to Chris G6HTH for bringing his collection!