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Beale Street, Memphis, TN - What else need to be said. Home of the Blues, Birthplace of Rock-n-Roll
Memphis lingers on the warm breeze with the sweet smoke of barbeque pits and the melancholy mojo of the best guitar you've ever heard. There's just something real about Memphis. From the holy grails of music landmarks to the restaurants, from the basketball court to the acclaimed Memphis Zoo, from the elegant hotels to the mystical nightclubs on legendary Beale Street, Memphis has an irresistible soul that has drawn people for more than a century.
One
of the companies that made history was ALTEC Lansing. As you can see from old
rock movies, ALTEC Voice of the Theater components also wound up in many of the
large PA systems that launched the sonic blastoffs of the sixties. This
culminated, of course, at Woodstock. After the festival lost its initial site,
someone recommended they bring in Bill Hanley Sound to handle the expected
150,000 people (we know how low THAT estimate turned out to be). Hanley, a
visionary engineer who had done a Beatle stadium tour, and who also had a hand
in developing the now-ubiquitous "wedgie" stage monitors, picked the exact
position of the stage on Yasgur's Farm. He assembled a custom system on a scale
rarely heard of at the time, out of Altec and JBL components, but mostly Altec.
For some reason, it is now gospel on the Internet that JBL's were used at
Woodstock, but examination of old pictures shows what are clearly Altec horns
and huge 4x15" Altec bass bins. These famous "Woodstock Bins" ended up in South
Africa, where they helped cause a revolution. In fact the only JBL iron at
Woodstock was in the actual 15" bass drivers inside the big cabinets.
Sometimes, as in the case of the legendary A7, Altecs wound up absolutely
everywhere. The A7, a smaller bass horn/reflex box crossing over at 800 or 500
Hz to a 4-cell sectoral horn, became pro audio's Model T. It has to be the most
recognizable pro speaker ever made. Not necessarily the best sounding, you
understand, but certainly the most recognizable. They still turn up in big
studios, at gigs, in clubs, and, heavily modified and fussed over, even in DIY
audiophile's garages. One sculptor makes a fancy cabinet out of furniture wood.
Someone even has a full-size stone picture of this speaker on their grave
marker. No wonder the successor company called Altec Lansing Technologies still
offers a "legacy" A7 limited edition, for anyone with $6000 per speaker (you can
buy them online!).
http://alteclansingunofficial.nlenet.net/ | http://www.ominous-valve.com/altec.html | http://www.vintagealtecinfo.com/index.html
During the late forties and early fifties, the value of the name Lansing as a trade identification was extremely high. Although it strictly belonged to the Altec Lansing Corporation, the new company made use of the name Lansing in the style of Jim Lansing "Signature" loudspeakers. The use of the word Signature implied that one could not take a man's name away from him, even though the name had been given or sold previously as a commodity in a business transaction.
Up to about 1955, the James B. Lansing Sound Company sold loudspeakers with the identification "Jim Lansing Signature Sound" emblazoned boldly on the pot structures. The company was quite small at that time, but by the mid-fifties it had become apparent that the new company was here to stay and was becoming a more significant force in the marketplace. At that time, Carrington was pressed by many of his field people to do something about this flagrant use of the name Lansing by the new company. George Carrington and Alvis Ward of Altec then entered a long round of polite out-of-court negotiations with Thomas, and they agreed that the new company would cease and desist in labeling of the product as Lansing. A decision was made by Thomas to capitalize on the initials, JBL, in identifying the company. The initials JBL, along with the familiar exclamation point have become synonymous with the current identity of James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated. (Nobody remembers exactly where the exclamation point came from.)