Gramophone Dreams

The image above is not a modernist oil painting. It's an airport x-ray of my friend Jeffrey Jackson's backpack.

Can you identify its contents? Did you notice the red rectangle alerting the inspector of a suspicious object? Do you know what that suspicious object is? Or what it is worth?

That ominous-looking black silhouette is a 1930s-era Western Electric 555W "receiver"—ie, a compression driver for use with a horn. It's about 10" in diameter and weighs around 15lb. It requires a 7V DC/1.4A power supply for its field-coil magnet and would cost about $8000 to replace.

In the compartment to its right are some old tubes: The large ST-size ("Coke-bottle") tube is an Elektromekano S6, made in Copenhagen around 1941. The round tube is the storied Western Electric 205D "tennis ball," which was engineered to be a super-linear audio-frequency amplifier for applications "where power outputs of 1 watt or less are required."

The three other (T9-size) tubes are 6EM7s, scheduled for delivery to a German tonearm designer we all love and admire.

In the third compartment is a measurement microphone and an Apogee Duet audio interface for Mac computers.

A friendly explanation got Jeffrey past the people with blue nitrile gloves. The traveler behind him, reel-to-reel tape guru Charlie King, was not so lucky. He had a Stellavox recorder and a bag full of antique magnetic tapes that had deteriorated into nitro-something-or-other, which apparently set off some bomb-sniffing dog. My other traveling companion, Dave Slagle, passed through easily—despite carrying an over-the-weight-limit collection of transformers, coils of wire, and a platoon of curious-looking homemade phono cartridges.

My backpack rolled through easily despite numerous bottles of suspicious-looking fluids and a cast-iron throat for a Western Electric 24A horn.

Dave Slagle, Jeffrey Jackson, and I were flying to Paris on our way to the 2019 European Triode Festival (ETF) in Bellême, France. Jeffrey and Dave were planning to construct an improved version of the Salt Cellar System they demonstrated at ETF 2018, named for the room in which it was demonstrated (see below). I described that radical creation in an AudioStream article entitled "Secret Societies of the Audiophile."

For me, that 2018 system was unforgettable. It took listening to recorded music to a place where artist-humans like Miles Davis and Mississippi Fred McDowell upstaged the powerful, otherworldly look of the bulky speakers they were playing from. It took listening to a place that was all engagement and zero critical thinking. That original Salt Cellar System did exactly what Art Dudley described in his description of Jeffrey Jackson's horn system in the Experience Music demo space back in the states:

"In this setting, as in [Jackson's] basement in Rhinebeck, it seemed to me that Jackson's playback gear succeeded in finding the humans in the recordings, in a manner that rendered everything else less important, at least at that moment."

Art elaborated: "It was eerie, hypnotic stuff, creepy yet carnal and addictively relentless: a mix of nearly overwhelming sensations, and an experience almost anyone would pay for if they knew such a thing could be had for mere money. This was music playback at its best and most essential, and for the rest of the day, the list of attributes I'm paid to listen for was crumpled and discarded, as from the open window of a car headed somewhere better."

I thought the 2019 Salt Cellar System delivered an even more tangible experience of "humans in the recordings" than last year's system. Therefore, I'm devoting this entire Gramophone Dreams to describing the humans behind the sound and engineering of both systems.

Listening in the salt cellar
The ETF 2019 system was constructed in situ in a corner recess of a low-ceilinged room in a 15th century, heavy-stone, arch-and-column building—a place where, for centuries, locals stored their most valuable commodity: salt. As you read this story, keep in mind: These systems only ever existed inside the Bellême, France, salt cellar. They are not commercial products.

The Teo Macero–assembled collage elements in "Yesternow," from Miles Davis's A Tribute to Jack Johnson (LP, Columbia KC 30455), fit together perfectly in some marvelous but inexplicable way. The only thing for sure is: Recorded instrumental texture was the glue Macero used to construct this masterpiece, yet almost never do box speakers (with dome tweeters) convey enough palpable instrumental texture to reveal the armature of "Yesternow"'s construction. The Salt Cellar horns did. The unique "tweeter" in this mono speaker preserved the leading edges of transients (and the inner-dimensionality of texture) in a way that made Miles's trumpet, Herbie Hancock's keyboard, and Billy Cobham's drums feel substantially present and conspicuously intelligible—with no phasey mishegas insinuating themselves between my ears and the artist's instruments. Miles's high-octane inventions appeared fully accessible. Unclouded. Uncompressed. With headphone-like transparency.

Besides Miles, Jeffrey played a lot of Mississippi Fred McDowell: You may be high, you may be low / you may be rich, child, you may be poor / but when the Lord gets ready, you got to move.

We listened to Fred McDowell: The Alan Lomax Recordings (LP, Mississippi Records MR074). I have listened to these single-microphone Alan Lomax recordings on every hi-fi I've ever had. But I never before stood this directly in the electrified ether-vapor between Fred's guitar and Lomax's microphone.

Jeffrey and I and several listeners all agreed: Mississippi Fred was sitting on the bass horn, strumming his guitar, his head just in front of the 24A's mouth. Amazingly, McDowell was exactly life-size—not too small like on my home speakers, or too large like on most (stereo) horn speakers.

System specifics
The Salt Cellar System's unique high-frequency transducer utilized a walnut horn with a flare that was a conical approximation of the one designed by the late Jean-Michel Le Cléac'h, with a field-coil motor designed and fabricated entirely (except for the diaphragm) by Jeffrey Jackson.

This unique tweeter-horn rolled off at 5kHz via a single Western Electric capacitor. It was crossed over to a rare, 12-cell, soldered-tin Western Electric 24A midrange horn with a 20A receiver attachment that accepts a single WE555W compression driver: the black silhouette in Jeffrey's backpack. The WE 24A is a very early cinema horn that covers frequencies from 300Hz to 5kHz. It is impossible to find and quite valuable. Collectors lucky enough to have one usually hang it from their ceiling to show off. But nobody plays music with a 24A because it has a flat front, and every horn cell is a different length. Jeffrey thought maybe these different length cells could be an advantage: "Maybe each cell has a different resonant peak?" I listened to music with one ear close in front of each individual cell. Each cell sounded slightly different—but also profoundly clear and surprisingly quiet. Evidence of low distortion.

The midhorn crosses over to a plywood bass horn at 300Hz, which, like the tweeter, was designed by Jackson and employs a conical version of the Le Cléac'h flare. This 50–300Hz horn is powered by a 15" Altec woofer; it's open at its back, allowing the room corner to amplify frequencies below 50Hz. Did the bass horn work? It must have: We played Kendrick Lamar!

Actually, the sound of the system's bass was natural—not hi-fi—in a way ported boxes never can be. The gray-painted window shutter in the picture, to the left of the horns in the photo, served as an improvised baffle to create a more gradual impedance match from the high pressure in the horn to the lower atmospheric pressure of the room.

Besides the WE tweeter capacitor, the only crossover in the system was an elegantly executed subtractive crossover, at 300Hz—accomplished by wiring the tube power amp's two nickel-cored output transformers in series: one for the woofer, one for the midrange.