Quote:
Originally Posted by compucat
I worked on one of those Morse Electrophonic console stereos at a TV shop called All Brands Electronics in 1988. It had two 4" speakers like the kind you would find in 1960s tube radios mounted in a console cabinet, really cheap junk.
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About three or four years ago, I saw a Morse Electrophonic console stereo on a treelawn not far from my apartment; it probably had dinky little 4" speakers as well. The stereo was in a very large and heavy console cabinet and was sitting next to another console, RCA, IIRC. The Morse-Electrophonic system, again IIRC, had an 8-track player so it must have been mid-'60s-'70s vintage.
BTW, why on earth did manufacturers the likes of Morse-Electrophonic do things like this? It makes no sense to put literally tiny speakers in a console cabinet that almost certainly outweighs the rest of the system at least a couple of times over.
The sound quality probably wasn't much better, either, than that from a large transistor radio. This type of stereo was obviously designed for people who don't care beans about sound quality, as long as the system will play so loud it rattles the walls; of course, with only 4" speakers (which have very small magnets and voice coils), five minutes at full volume will ruin them. An amplifier will often put out more power, when driven into distortion, than that for which it was designed. If the speakers are not designed to handle that much power (very cheap ones aren't, and even quality speakers, for example Cerwin-Vega's, will be damaged or destroyed if played at much more than normal listening volume), they will fail in very short order.