Hello Keith,
The Vortex Screen was the culmination of a student project I started in 1976 while at Cal Tech. My group spent about three years doing R&D to come up with what we considered to be the best technology available at that time. Our goal was to design a multi-way speaker that had the coherence, clarity and speed of the lab's reference Quad ESL. However, we wanted a wider dispersion for several listeners to enjoy the sound, along with deeper and punchier bass, combined with more "air" at the top end. Although the Quad was likely the best speaker available if only midrange frequencies were considered, we wanted to design (for our own use) a better system. After all, back in the 1970's, we listened to pretty loud music and the Quad was designed for a more mature and "quiet" audience.
Although we built a few pairs of original Screen prototypes for other students and one of our teachers (!), we did not consider it to be a commercial product in any sense of the word, although it proved to be a ground breaking design. I believe we were the first to have a Time Aligned, Phase Coherent, and high slope crossover design, with a 10" woofer tuned to 32Hz (we didn't have access to many low resonance woofers back then), a 5" Kevlar midrange, and a 3/4" fabric dome tweeter, all housed in small cabinets that were stacked on top of each other. To make it cosmetically nice enough to use at home, we copied the cloth sock feature used by Acoustat.
The first " commercial" version we sold to several studios (including one owned by Robert Harley, now Editor of TAS), was a 50" tall x 8" deep by 20" wide slab, using a small folded transmission line cabinet with side firing output vent. This model was simply called "The Screen" and retailed for $1,500/pr. We have seen this original model selling for twice the original price as it is still one of the best sounding (and imaging) speaker ever made (according to their owners). We built around 80 pairs of this version from 1979 to 1984. The drivers used for this original system used an 8" Becker polycone subwoofer, an 8" Vifa polycone midbass driver, a Davis (of France) 5" Kevlar midrange, and a 3/4" Dynaudio fabric dome tweeter. This was likely the first phase coherent speaker that used steep slope crossovers, suggested to me by my friend Sigfried Linkwist, who was an engineer at HP. He later wrote speaker building articles and after he retired from HP, started Audio Artistry. He, of course, invented the Linkwist Riley crossover design, which uses two stacked crossover circuits in order to rotate the phase back to positive polarity with in-phase driver wiring.
Since that model was huge and could not be shipped by UPS, in 1985 we cut the cabinet in half, making each portion UPS shippable. This model used an 8" woofer in a folded line, and the upper cabinet that stacked on top used a 4" midrange and 1" aluminum dome tweeter. All drivers were made for us by Vifa and SEAS. This model retailed for $1,995/pr and came in four different cartons. About 150 pairs of this model were made from 1985 to 1989. You have to remember that these were built as a hobby and that I had a "real" day job, so our goal was not "numbers of sold units" but experience and the chance to do more and more R&D.
In 1993, we turned the wide cabinet sideways due to pressure from home theater fans that wanted a narrow speaker that would fit on each side of an equipment cabinet and TV monitor. This was the conversion of the Screen into the model called VR-4. This stood for "virtual reality" in 4 dimensions: Time, Space, Phase, and Amplitude. When the VR-4 was announced, we received more than 1,000 orders which almost forced me to stop making them, as I didn't have enough personnel or space to build this many speakers at once. The original price was $3,000/pr and undercut our competition by five times. Two magazines compared the VR-4 to a famous maker $15,000/pr two piece stacking system and in both comparisons, the VR-4 was judged to be the winner by a wide margin. The two magazines that were brave enough to conduct the side-by-side tests were Positive Feedback (when it was in print form) and a Swedish magazine (similar to Stereophile) called HiFi & Musik, which placed much reliance on measurements, just like Stereophile. Their six listener panel judged the VR-4 as "The Best Speaker We Have Heard" and that article caused a furor all over the world.
Historical note: I had several "real" day jobs during these days, and built the Vortex Screens with a couple of friends in our spare time. It was common for me to work 80-100 hours per week, as I had a very high degree of interest in acoustic and mechanical engineering, and was also a musician and audiophile. During the time I developed the Screens over a 20 year period, I worked as a driver designer at ESS Labs with Dr. Oskar Heil, then later worked as a QC Engineer and crossover circuit designer at KSC Corp, where I had designed crossovers for Klipsch, JBL, Infinity, and about 30 other companies. I became friends with Mathew Polk, John Ulrick (co-founder of Infinity), Paul Klipsch, and many other designers who had been my heroes since I had started building speakers as a hobby. From 1991 to 1993, as a consultant to Counterpoint Electronics, I became associated with George Lucas and his THX project. A couple of years later, I won Product Of The Year awarded by Video Magazine in 1995 for my THX speaker design built under the Counterpoint brand. During all of these years, I built speakers at a small shop for friends and the Vortex Screen was the speaker that launched my career as an independent designer.
I hope that this note answers your questions. If you have any more, please don't hesitate to call us. We still support models built in 1976!
Happy Listening,
AVS
