British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Makes me think I've given away a car's worth of stuff I had back in the 80's and 90's. I guess you never know.:blush:
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

I think I would keep the Altec stuff, the WEM kit worked but even in the 60's + 70's there was better gear, to get anywhere with that generation of WEM kit you need loads of it and nobody could afford it really, so you had to persuade/pay Charlie to bring along all his kit to do it for you and to be fair he could get it to work but it wasn't the a task for normal mortals. I've used bits of that stuff in the distant past and even then it was clearly not the best and once the likes of Perkins bins and Altec became available over here WEM didn't last long in the touring world. G
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

mark anderson said:
Good God, you're right.
Altec Lansing H 1504 Vintage Multicell Horn Quad Throat Ultra RARE | eBay
I can't imagine. Why?
Same reason antique collectors gather what they do I suppose?
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You should see what 1930s Western Electric theater gear goes for!

No one's using this stuff for PA, it's going to Asian collectors who use it for hifi. In a domestic setting you can run that stuff up to ear-bleed levels with a 3W single-ended tube amp.
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Dave Barnett said:
You should see what 1930s Western Electric theater gear goes for!

No one's using this stuff for PA, it's going to Asian collectors who use it for hifi. In a domestic setting you can run that stuff up to ear-bleed levels with a 3W single-ended tube amp.
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That stuff is all Field Coil, if I am not wrong. And highly prized.
I know a guy who has tossed dozens of them out.
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

I got a western electric horn from an old cinema which had sat empty since ww2 along with a 4w tube amp and it's spare, tremendous thing, sold it to a guy who wanted it for a cinema museum, still have the amps but didn't really have anywhere to put the horn so it had to go.
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Jack Arnott said:
That stuff is all Field Coil, if I am not wrong. And highly prized.
I know a guy who has tossed dozens of them out.
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We all threw away gear that was "old"-before it started being valuable.

I really wish I had some of the stuff I threw away-----------------------
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

gordon mcgregor said:
I got a western electric horn from an old cinema which had sat empty since ww2 along with a 4w tube amp and it's spare, tremendous thing, sold it to a guy who wanted it for a cinema museum, still have the amps but didn't really have anywhere to put the horn so it had to go.
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Was the horn anything like this?

we15a_556.jpg

Do the amps use WE 300B output tubes?
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

The amps use vt4c tubes they are buried in a pile of old kit that I keep in the attic I'll dig them out or find a photo of them, yes the horn did look something like that its 35 years ago but that looks familiar G
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

gordon mcgregor said:
The amps use vt4c tubes they are buried in a pile of old kit that I keep in the attic I'll dig them out or find a photo of them, yes the horn did look something like that its 35 years ago but that looks familiar G
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Oh, VT4C is a big one, that's the same as a 211A. You can get close to 20W out of a single-ended one, but the B+ would be over 1200V.

I don't guess the horn had a driver on it? A big WE15A horn like that would have had a WE555 field coil compression driver. Those fetch big money.

12_13BAE.jpg
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Dave the whole thing was working on the day I took it! even the projector, it was from a government building that had been sold off and was getting stripped out the guys working there didn't want it, I got in touch with the collector and we just took it all away he didn't need the power amps as he already had some whose casings were better but I doubt if they were as original as the ones I've got. The plate voltage can come down a lot from 1200V though you lose output, mine have a B+ of around 450V so about 4W audio output. I haven't fired them up for a few years but one day I'll drag them and the other stuff I've collected out into the open and get them going again. The old van I had at the time wasn't big enough to get that thing into it so we strapped it onto the roof and drove 30 miles to where this guy lived. I got about $200 for the horn and the projector :( though that was the same as 4 weeks wages back then as a 1st year apprentice gas engineer!
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

gordon mcgregor said:
Dave the whole thing was working on the day I took it! even the projector, it was from a government building that had been sold off and was getting stripped out the guys working there didn't want it, I got in touch with the collector and we just took it all away he didn't need the power amps as he already had some whose casings were better but I doubt if they were as original as the ones I've got. The plate voltage can come down a lot from 1200V though you lose output, mine have a B+ of around 450V so about 4W audio output. I haven't fired them up for a few years but one day I'll drag them and the other stuff I've collected out into the open and get them going again. The old van I had at the time wasn't big enough to get that thing into it so we strapped it onto the roof and drove 30 miles to where this guy lived. I got about $200 for the horn and the projector :( though that was the same as 4 weeks wages back then as a 1st year apprentice gas engineer!
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It's kind of surprising that there was any WE gear in Scotland. Western Electric almost never sold sound gear, it was usually leased. I figured the UK would have their own local brands.
 
Re: British Watkins WEM Twin HORNS from FESTIVAL STACKS! Rare Birds! - $275

Who knows what actual horn it was but it was very similar to that and just about as large, the amps had RCA badges on the cover I was 17 at the time and was only interested in the amps because of the fad for valve amps in the hi fi world. This stuff came from a large wartime briefing cinema in an old government building in the centre of Glasgow, during the war the building had been used as a naval command centre for the convoys from to and from the Clyde and was also used as a general command headquarters for the Allied forces in the area later on, the building was stripped out in the late 70's and some bits of it looked as though they hadn't been touched since the war, we were in to make safe the gas mains, meters etc. and came across the guys trying to work out how to move all this stuff and managed to convince them to let us take it. When I got it home the amps fired up perfectly and the projectors shutter and film handling all ran once I'd worked out how to power them we found spare bulbs, though never tried them. Didn't have the space to try the big horn and to be honest I probably wouldn't have known how to connect it correctly.
 
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