Imagine that there's a Hall of Fame that recognises the influence and significance of a component's contribution to the development and perpetuation of hi-fi.
What component(s) would you like to see inducted?
A person, perhaps?
Henry Kloss:
The Man Who Changed Audio and
Video -- Time and Time Again
Henry Kloss died early this month at the age of 72. If you're an audio- or videophile to any extent,
you probably owe him a huge debt. I know I do. When I first became interested in hi-fi, I was lucky
enough to purchase a pair of Kloss's Larger Advent Loudspeakers. No, that's not a typo -- that's the
kind of company Advent was. At the time it made two models of loudspeaker: The Larger Advent
Loudspeaker and The Smaller Advent Loudspeaker.
Combined with my beloved AR turntable (post Kloss), those remarkable speakers hooked me on the
sound of reproduced music and gave me thousands of hours of musical pleasure.
Later in life, after having sold all my hi-fi gear to go and live in Peru, I purchased another AR
turntable, an Advent receiver, and a pair of AR-3A loudspeakers upon my return to the States. Now
that was a system to reckon with!
More recently, I reviewed Kloss's valedictory effort, the Tivoli Henry Kloss Model One Table Radio.
One wasn't enough. Now I own two.
I couldn't even begin to guess how much musical pleasure I've derived from Kloss's well-designed,
reasonably priced products over the years. But I'm not alone -- the man revolutionized the audio
industry.
Let's go back to the early 1950s and survey the audio scene. Hi-fi was a burgeoning hobby and the
LP record had newly arrived on the scene -- making it possible for enthusiasts to reproduce sounds
across the sonic spectrum. Dynamic loudspeakers were huge boxes -- one capable of reproducing
40Hz needed to be about 14' tall. Movie theaters had 'em, but homes?
Edgar M. Villchur, a teacher at NYU, hit upon a novel approach. By sealing a speaker's enclosure,
he could use the springiness of the trapped air, rather than the mechanical spring of a driver's suspension.
"All I needed to do," he told Steve Birchall years later, "was to decimate the springy stiffness
of the speaker suspensions, and reduce the size of the enclosure until the air spring was
strong enough to replace the springs we threw away. It also turned out that within the compressions
and rarefactions this air spring would undergo, the response was almost perfectly linear." Thus was
born the compact, full-range, air-suspension speaker.
Except for one small detail. Nobody wanted it. After having been rejected by the two established
speaker manufacturers he'd approached, Villchur was discouraged. Then he received an expression
of interest in the design from a former student, Kloss, who was building Baruch-Lang speakers for
mail order in his Cambridge workshop. In late spring 1954, Villchur demonstrated his prototype to
Kloss, playing, among other LPs, an E. Power Biggs record with massive pedal tones. Kloss immediately
grasped the possibilities and offered his Cambridge loft as a manufacturing facility. Acoustic
Research (AR) was born with $4000 Kloss raised from his friends and $2000 from Villchur.
Kloss immediately threw himself into the partnership. Villchur credited him with 75% of the produc-
tion design of the AR-1. Villchur and a physicist friend, Tony Hoffman, contributed the rest. They
managed to assemble two AR-1s in time to demonstrate them at the New York Audio Show in
September 1954. Astonishingly, the critics didn't "get" it. Although they were impressed by the
speaker's clean 32Hz bass response, they didn't understand why anyone would want "miniature"
loudspeakers. Julian Hirsch was particularly puzzled, noting "The AR-1 had the lowest electroacoustic
efficiency of any loudspeaker on the market," but at least he recognized that "at 25Hz and
below, it was more efficient than the Klipschorn, which had the highest efficiency of those tested."
He grudgingly allowed that the AR-1 "established a new industry standard for low distortion bass."
The public, however, had no problem grasping that the AR-1 delivered big speaker sound in a small
package. And, while the speaker did consume a lot more power than the efficient designs it outsold,
this was the golden age of great 40-50W tube amplifiers, which were easily capable of driving it.
Villchur and Kloss had succeeded in taming hi-fi for the masses. With the AR-2, they lowered the
price of the speakers to $89/each. The model AR-3A introduced the dome tweeter -- which is now
nigh unto ubiquitous.
Kloss left AR to found KLH in 1957. In the early 1960s, Kloss built the first high-selectivity FM radio -
- the KLH Model 8, now considered a design classic. He also designed the first successful audio
product to employ transistors, the KLH Model 11 portable phonograph.
In 1967, he founded his own company, Advent, where he offered well-designed loudspeakers
employing premium-quality components. His speakers were the reference standard of their era. In
fact, the first issues of The Abso!ute Sound touted a pair of stacked Advents (an upside-down
speaker on top of one standing right-side up) as its reference.
Kloss always claimed that the audio side of Advent was merely a means to produce the funds to
develop his true passion, projection TV. Advent produced a two-piece projection system that ended
up primarily in bars, where it displayed sporting events - ironically, this was before the VCR and the
concept of watching movies on video existed. Kloss refused to take credit for "inventing" projection
television, insisting that it was less an invention than a collection of practical electrical engineering
knowledge. Despite this avowal, he is considered the creator of the industry.
Kloss also developed the Advent Model 200, the first cassette equipped with Dolby B noise reduction
-- which, of course, was the missing element that made music recorded on cassette listenable.
One of the two times I met him, he described his cross-country flight to persuade Ray Dolby to
license him the technology. "I knew that if I didn't get some sleep on the flight over that I could never
be sharp at that meeting," he told me. "So I went back to an empty row of seats in the middle and
slept on the floor under them. The stewardesses thought I was insane, but I got eight hours of
sleep!"
Kloss later founded Cambridge SoundWorks, a company that pioneered direct-to-the-consumer marketing
before the creation of the Internet. The company advocated small satellite speakers and modestly
sized centrally located woofer units, as well as surround-sound and computer speaker systems.
Kloss sold the firm in 1997.
He wasn't done. While at Cambridge SoundWorks, he had developed a high-quality radio -- the
Model 88 Table Radio -- which was reminiscent of his classic Model 8. In 2000, he went back to
table radios one more time, creating the Tivoli Henry Kloss Model One Table Radio, a design that
exploited advanced engineering techniques that allow cell-phones to deliver crisp, clear sound from
marginal signals. To a generation raised on disposable portables, it's a revelation -- a $99 radio that
looks good, sounds good, and is built to last for another 20 years.
It's a fitting legacy for the man who never set his sights on anything less.
...Wes Phillips
[email protected]
