Here is a very interesting bit of fact I had received
from a gentleman named
Thanks! Laurie for submitting this bit of history
Cheers and Beers!
Hi from
the
I was
sent a nostalgia picture of the Ionofane speaker today in email and so
I went
on a search to Google and found your paragraph about extending the
life of
the glass cell. Very interesting. However
I was puzzled to find no
reference
to Bowers and Wilkins Ltd of Worthing Sussex England, who marketed
the P2
Speaker that I owned for thirty years nor to Sony Corporation who
also
marketed the P2 B and W speaker under license in
The "Ionofane" ionic tweeter was
made by Fane Acoustics who were originally
into PA
equipment for Rock Groups and so forth,
but they branched out into
developing
this unit for the hifi. They went out
of fashion as people
started
to lose interest in "tubes" and went for
stopped
doing tube amplifiers or "valve amplifiers" as we call them in the
sophisticated
high performing valve stuff and it costs a mint. When I
started
having trouble with my ionofanes the valves were starting to get
scarce
and the makers were borrowing them and swapping them from old defunct
units in
the workshop and from wherever they could find them, to get repairs
done.
You may be interested to know that the Fane
unit was also sold in speakers
with the
SONY name on the front. I walked into
Bowers and Wilkins factory
and shop
in
Monitors
with the Sony badge on the front showing neatly in silver with the
Sony
name and wavy line. I asked Mr Wilkins
(the financial partner of the
business)
why there were P2's with Sony name on the front out in the
despatch
department, and he said, "Sony have asked us to send them some P2's
and we
have agreed to let them market them under license in
own name
on them" Such contractual arrangements I knew little about in my
humble
days as a Sales Rep for EMI Records but I knew that somewhere people
will
have bought P2's equipped with Ionofane tweeters quite legitimately
believing
them to be made by Sony when they were made by Bowers and Wilkins.
I don't know how many were involved but I do
know that this happened having
seen it
for myself. So that may be relevant to your site information or not,
depending
on how important you feel it is.
Bowers and Wilkins have as far as I am aware,
long since washed their hands
of any
work on Ionic units. At one time in the
1980's Wilkins himself
kindly
used to deliver my repaired units back to me at home when he visited
his
ageing mother. His family owned a Real Estate Agents in our town who
still
thrive.
It got
rather boring sending the transformer unit and ionic horn back to
them for
repair so often, and they hung on to the
units for months before
they
could get them running that I just jacked in using them. I still miss
them.
But life goes on with or without Ionofane tweeters!
The P2 H "monitor" model speakers
were used by the BBC as monitors for
high-quality
use in the studios for some years in the late 1960's and early
1970's. Nowadays they use the term
"Reference" speakers in that role.
The
mid
range and bass unit was a special laminated-glass speaker cone
manufactured
in
eliptical
speaker and had a bass porting to a piece of plastic drainpipe to
tunnel
the bass out through a port at the bottom which was possible to blank
off if
room acoustics demanded less bass. It was always said that the
speaker
was heavily bass-colored, and its saving grace was the Ionic tweeter
that was
as sweet as an "electrostatic" when reproducing speech and music.
Someone said the transformer and driver unit
for the ionofane was a very
efficient
radiant heater and was little more use than that. This might
explain
why the design caused the transformers to regularly burn out. In
fact
mine burned out long before the glass cell was needing changing.
========================================================
This is from a gentleman who purchased a pair of the
cell kits for a pair of German made Ionovacs.
Hi Jack,
Some time
ago I purchased your electrode and cell kit. They work fabulous! Here are some
pictures of my project. The tweeter was made by Otto Braun in
If you like
you can put the pictures on your website.
Best
Regards
Ulrich
Thank You Ulrich for sharing your information and
pictures
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