Konut,
While I agree that Mr. PHD Geddes was the first (maybe) to use the term as applied to horn theory, I was building them. In the early '90s I developed the first Timepiece (1.0?) - we just called it the Timepiece back then. I was demonstrating the first prototypes to our little "speaker building club" that Bruce Bartlett (Crown Mic designer and recording engineer), Jim Wordinger (Crown amp designer), Dave Harris ("Bassbox" speaker design software developer) and myself (the "Pres"
) started at the Crown facility - and that before Earl published his paper "the Oblate Spheroidal Waveguide in the journal of the AES. As an intersting side note, the 5 of us tried to get "the one and only" D.B. Keele to be an "officer" of our club as well, but he was too busy - but he came to the meetings!
Anyway...back to the subject. As another intersting little "tidbit," I had thought of and implemented the concept of matching the radiation pattern of the woofer to that of the tweeter at crossover around the same time Earl proposed the idea. The only difference was the he was "somebody" and published papers while I was "nobody" and just built the things - and that not knowing a thing about his proposal at the time.
You might find it intersting to note that there was this young engineer (can't remember his name now days) that had a paper published in the AES Journal a month or two after Earl's paper that took a really good stab at Earl's idea. Through the math (WAY beyond me) he showed that the OSW was nothing more than a CD horn. Of course, Earl surely did and still would take issue with that guy's argument, but it does give one cause to stop and ponder.
Nevertheless, we'll give Earl credit where credit is due - he probably was the first to at least popularize the term. But even then, there were these guys working for Kenwood that wrote a paper using the term as applied to tweeters and it was before Earl's. They built this "little thing" that they showed was able to reduce/eliminate tweeter diffraction artifacts. It was their paper that gave me the idea to pursue the waveguide approach and I had already built and tested two different prototype speaker systems using them before Earl's OSW paper was published. Oh... and this was all before Genelec, Mackie or any of the other pro monitor companies where marketing systems using waveguides.
So... who's on first? I wish I had half the brains Earl does, but the way I figure it, what's more important...talking about a thing or doing it? "Faith without works is dead" is the doctrine I try to live by. SP Tech may not even be the first to have started producing a product based on waveguides, but I suspect that we've gotten more "milage" out of the device and refined systems based on it to a higher degree of performance than virtually anybody else.
I guess I'm just hoping that folks remember that when they start seeing them popping up everywhere - which you will. At some point you either evolve and follow the trend or get left behind. Most recent and previous to the waveguide was the ceramic and diamond driver rage. First there where one or two companies using them, then everybody climbed on board - now even B&W!
Once again, the "smarter" companies will be the first to use waveguides and many of the "holdouts" will go the way of the dinosaurs. Just ask Darwin if you don't believe me.
So there... that's my profoundly prophetic utterance for the day.
Take care,
-Bob
PS. The Bose claim is for their bass reproducing system. It all started with their "Acoustic Cannon" tube device. Since then the mathematical models have been extended to include the "6th order" dual-port bass box design. It has nothing to do with tweeters or high frequency applications.
But... maybe they were the first to use the term.
