Golden Oldies

Photo by Cindy Ord, Getty Images

The manager of our local produce market is an enthusiastic musician and amateur composer, and sometimes collars me when I’m walking between Mike the butcher, and Nathan the vegetable guy, to ask about a specific piece of equipment that he’s planning to add to his home studio. The other day, he announced that he was thinking of buying some new speakers and asked for my opinion on one that he’d read about, the Auratone 5C. This loudspeaker started to appear in recording studios in the 1970s. It was a small, square box with a single driver, and it sounded—well, not to put too fine a point on it—pretty average, but that was, after all, its function. It was there to be a lowest common denominator speaker on which you could check to see how a music mix made using the high-end speaker systems in the recording studio would translate to the often band-limited systems that people had in their cars or as part of their home hi-fi systems, at which it excelled. You could drive it hard, the sealed cabinet kept it mainly free from nasty resonances, it didn’t rattle, and it was dirt-cheap, so it didn’t really matter if you blew it up. And, by virtue of its dirt cheap-ness, it became a sort of reference speaker every studio could afford, so if you moved your mix from one studio to another, you could always check that it sounded the same on the Auratones.

But there was an unintended consequence to people seeing these low-end speakers in high-end facilities, especially as the boom in home recording studios had just started to take off. An artist, wanting to put a demo studio in his basement, but lacking the finances and/or space to install proper monitor speakers, would buy a pair of these as main monitors and started referring to them as “near-field” monitors, rather than “average-sounding-cheap-speakers-that-I saw-in-a-big studio” monitors, which is what they actually were. After a while, the Auratones largely fell out of favor, to be replaced by the still ubiquitous Yamaha NS-10s, which were rather more expensive but did actually sound reasonable, although the almost total lack of any coherent low frequency output could fool the unwary into adding bucket-loads of EQ to make up for the speaker’s deficiencies. And then there was the tissue-paper mod, but that’s another story.

Anyway, back to the Auratones and Kris, the musical market manager. After I apprised him of the origin of the 5C and its exalted place in the history of recording, he asked what I thought a secondhand pair would cost, and I told him I wouldn’t pay more than $50 or $60 for a used pair in good condition. He looked a bit surprised and told me that the current average used price for a pair was in the region of $400. Did I think that was about right? I said I didn’t and advised him to look elsewhere if he wanted a small, reasonably neutral box. Surprised by his comments about the price, I did some online research and discovered that, far from the average sounding box that I remember being unimpressed by, the Auratone 5C now has a huge following as some sort of revelatory device for making sure your mixes have an uncluttered mid-range and that used pairs in reasonable condition do indeed go for hundreds of dollars. I’m sure that there are many satisfied customers out there who agree that they’re more than worth it. I don’t mix pop music for a living, so if you’re an Auratone enthusiast, I apologize for damning your favorite speaker, and best of luck with them.

Normally, I would have shrugged my shoulders and muttered “à chacun son goût”—Pretentious? Moi?—but a similar occurrence got me thinking about the value placed on some items that have become desirable far beyond their seeming worth.

I was designing sound for a show in a small provincial theatre, and one of the in-house technicians asked me to have a look at a couple of speakers he’d removed from the control room. Were they worth keeping, or should he throw them in the skip? What he produced was a very clean pair of Chartwell LS3/5As, monitor speakers designed by the BBC for use in mobile control rooms and other areas where full-sized speakers would not be appropriate. They sounded pretty good and were manufactured by a number of companies under license from the BBC and found a place in many homes as relatively high-end bookshelf speakers for discerning hi-fi enthusiasts as well as in many theatres in the UK as control room monitors. As I remember, in their day, they were quite expensive—around $400 a pair—and we had to fight for the budget to buy them in my theatre back in the mid-1970s. I told the chap that, assuming they still worked, he should definitely keep them or maybe see what he could get for them on eBay. He came back rather excited some 20 minutes later, saying that he’d checked online and that a similar pair had sold for just under $3,000. A week later, a nice gentleman from China turned up at the stage door of the theatre with $2,900 in cash and took the speakers away. The theatre bought a pair of d&b sub-bass units and an amp with the cash, and we all lived happily ever after.

And then there are the vintage microphones. Some, I grant, are worth the huge prices they command. The splendid RCA ribbon mics, if well maintained, sound beautiful, as do many of the tube-based Neumanns. But a few years ago, a band called The White Stripes made it known that they’d used an STC 4021 microphone at a studio that specializes in vintage analog recording kits and indeed named the song “Ball and Biscuit” after the (incorrect) nickname by which the microphone was supposed to have been known by the BBC engineers who used it. The actual nickname was Apple and Biscuit, and the BBC chaps used the omnidirectional mic for a variety of things but most commonly for effects or for talk-back.

STC also made a number of variants of the 4021, including one for use as a communications microphone in tanks and battleships, with a quite severely tailored frequency response, and these, along with the original BBC-spec version, could be found in various places for a few bucks, right up until the time that The White Stripes became famous. At that point, the price for what is, once again, a fairly modest piece of kit, went through the roof, and you can now expect to pay $300 to $400 for one in reasonable condition.

Much the same thing has been going on with the venerable Reslo RBT ribbon microphone, much loved in the 1950s and '60s by British town halls and other institutions as the main microphone for PA systems in concert venues and, consequently, much photographed close to the lips of assorted members of pop groups of the period, including The Beatles. Once again, in good condition, with a new ribbon and the iron filings that inevitably collected around the magnet cleaned off, these are decent figure-eight microphones but hardly worth the $750 that’s the current asking price for one on eBay at the moment.

One fad—sorry, highly regarded methodology—for distorting—sorry again, warming up—your pristine in-the-box digital mixes, has been to bounce your tracks through a reel-to-reel tape machine, to get that nice, soft, saturated analog tape sound. This has also had some very odd consequences in terms of the price of secondhand kit. I recently failed to dissuade one very determined chap from buying a used domestic quarter-track tape recorder, offered at some exorbitant price on an auction site, simply because it shared the same German manufacturer as the hugely expensive multitrack machines about which this poor deluded fellow had heard. The machine used a belt-driven capstan, ran at 7.5 i.p.s., had a single record/playback head, and a track width of less than 1/16 of an inch, so he was going to have some really interesting times mastering his music, always assuming that the damned thing actually worked. Come to think of it, I may have heard some of it. I often wondered about that weird vibrato thing on all of Jessie J’s tracks.

Don’t misunderstand me; all of these items may have their uses, and someone somewhere is no doubt doing brilliant work with a pile of old audio junk that they paid a small fortune for to some dodgy dealer who can’t believe his luck, but equally, I also have no doubt that there are rather a lot of people who, having done the same thing and acquired The Beatles or White Stripes microphones at vast cost, are quietly putting them away in a closet or, more likely, looking for another sucker to pass them on to.

John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. His sound effects libraries are available online at   www.johnleonard.co.uk/immersive.html. Live Design readers receive a 30% discount on all libraries, excepting the monthly Dollar Deals, with the code LDM30.

For more, download the July issue of Live Design for free onto your iPad or iPhone from the Apple App Store, and onto your Android smartphone and tablet from Google Play.