And so the baton passes and you are now on the road to being that man 
Circle of life, sniff.
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Vitavox Thunderbolt might be good. Do they have drivers?
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The eternal flame shines brightly for us strange folk
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I’m not sure, he’s supposed to be phoning him and putting in a word for me to go around and take a look. so just a waiting game.
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Haha, it is just like drugs. A man who knows a man, the anticipation…
I think those Thunderbolt cabs were built for the smaller vitavox horns, so would fit your space
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being teased at the potential of a good time
Kevin Scott & I acquired a pair of Thunderbolts back in early 1992 & the cabinet design (beefed up & more nicely made) became the Air Partner. Thunderbolts came with the 4 cell RH-330 cast horns which were actually made for it. I’m not sure who else if anyone were doing a cast multi-cell when Vitavox launched that originally. They’re quite tall & imposing, certainly would be in your room.
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Did they have AK151 drivers originally?
The Thunderboldts considerably more interesting than a lot of the more fashionable speaker du jour.
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The pair we bought had AK-157 with ceramic magnets. I think they came with S3 as standard but our pair had S2. We were steered towards a very funny supplier of PA gear in Luton. Used to take rigs, including ship to shore naval systems up into a local park on the back of a pick up truck & test them frightening the bejaysus out of local dogwalkers etc.
The Thunderbolts we bought had been high up on the walls of the canteen at the Vauxhall factory & were used to provide sound for a roller disco they’d have there.
The marketing spiel for the Thunderbolts made much of their use by various bands including Blackfoot Sue. But later we learned Pink Floyd ran or would make use of a Vitavox pa system in their early days.
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Which was of course all normal for Luton. I guess footage caught by the Canberra exits somewhere.
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I’d heard/seen a few interesting horn systems in Tokyo & Seoul back in 1989 but, while I was impressed I couldn’t really engage with where their component parts had come from. Then on a trip to the Paris Show in 1992 we went to the amazing Maison de Laudiophile who were running an open house event at the same time. They were running a 4 way system with speakers using Onken (Japan) components & Hiraga made 300B amps based on the WE91A. This is quite good on the Maison de Láudiophile at that time although neglects that we’d also been making triode amps in the UK by 86/87
This set up made the traditional high-end bollocks over at the main show seem utterly ridiculous. I also heard Hiraga’s VoTT system at that show, also impressive.
I came back, told Kevin about it & said we need to have something like that. I’d seen Vitavox’s System 191 over in Seoul but didn’t realise that Vitavox were London (Harrow) based and were still actually making these types of drivers & speaker systems.
191
We visited them at their factory which was fascinating as they still had all the multi-cell fabrication jigs there but had pretty much run out of the tinsmiths who’d cut out & braze together all the parts. Indeed they shortly afterwards withdrew from making audio for home or pa & were just doing equipment for the army & navy. But they directed us to their mad re-seller in Luton & we bought the Thunderbolts & a few other bits from him. Kevin took that & with help from Neil Young at Vitavox put the Air Partners together.
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With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that these customers of Kondo were either using vintage WE speakers or his own YL horns with YL or Goto drivers. But at that time I’d never been behind the screen of a cinema and seen any of the speaker systems they used so couldn’t relate to them.
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Great history of where the current Living Voice set up (at least in part) came from.
Funnily enough I came across this article earlier today which gives a fuller account.
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6 moons did quite a good write up on the road to the Vox Olympian
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I think they get some of the dates wrong, I’m sure it wasn’t as early as 1990 but the general gist of those is correct. I wrote up that visit to Paris as a show report for HiFi World & they published it. I’ll have to dig it out & see when it was.
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All this talk as made me want the horn more than ever. any more horn stories or diy ideas etc keep em coming
vitavox circa 1931!
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Just measured the Air Scout I posted above, and it is 22.5" at its deepest point.
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