The Paragon of Summer: A
Cautionary Speaker-Buying Tale
Sometimes even audio experts (or future audio experts) can
be suckered by demonstration tricks. Or perhaps it was merely ignorance on both sides.
It was a summer Saturday in Chicago a little over 30 years
ago, and my friend Brian and I were sitting in an Oak Street audio shop waiting to be
blown away. The store had been closed for an hour or so, and we had been invited back for
a private demo. This wasn't normal procedure, I was sure, but the dealer smelled a big
sale so he was prepared to turn a few cartwheels for us.
The series of events that led to this evening had begun
about a year before when Brian had borrowed his brother's new car. It was equipped with a
stereo system, which was fairly unusual for the day, and Brian was immediately smitten by
the sound. He ran out and bought a system for his own car.
As it turned out, the unit he bought -- an eight-track
player -- was removable and, with an AC adaptor, could be used at home. Reasoning that he
might as well get full use of his equipment, he bought the adaptor and a pair of cheap
speakers and set them up in his apartment.
He soon tired of the sound of those speakers, so he bought
a pair of modest but well-respected hi-fi speakers. Trouble was, the player couldn't drive
them adequately, so he bought a stereo receiver to feed them. That made the player sound
lousy so he bought a combination open-reel/eight-track recorder, and since that allowed
him to roll his own cartridges, he went out and got a turntable as well.
The spiral of acquisition ended only when he was awarded an
internship at a hospital in Chicago, and set off for a year south of the 49th Parallel.
That was an enormous professional opportunity, of course, but Brian regarded it as an
audio opportunity as well.
He was well aware where his hi-fi buying was leading him:
eventually he would end up with something really elaborate and exotic. So rather than wait
for this to happen gradually, he decided to cut out the middle steps and go for the big
system right away. One good reason for this was that prices were generally a third to a
half lower in the U.S. than in Canada. Also, if he bought it early in his stay and owned
it for a full year before he came back to Canada, he could take it home duty-free as part
of his household goods. The timing seemed perfect.
He began to hit the hi-fi stores as soon as he arrived in
Chicago, and quickly decided that this particular one had the selection that came closest
to what he was looking for. Even so, he figured he would benefit from advice more
impartial than the store was likely to offer, and he invited me to help him shop.
Although I wasn't yet professionally involved in audio, I
had been an enthusiast since childhood, and was always the guy in the locker room or at
the office coffee machine that people would consult about audio matters. I was always
happy to oblige, even though I would learn later how much I really didn't know. Brian
trusted me, however, and since he was getting ready to drop a fairly major sum of money on
equipment, he decided it would be a wise investment to buy me a ticket to Chicago.
As is usually the case, the first priority was to choose
the speakers. Brian had a fairly clear idea of what he wanted: a couple of years earlier
we had gone to a hi-fi show together and had both been impressed by a speaker system
called the JBL Paragon. He fantasized about owning it, and took some trouble to find what
was perhaps the only store in Chicago that not only would sell him a Paragon, but actually
had it in stock. That's what we had come to hear that balmy Saturday night.
The JBL Paragon in a publicity shot from a
contemporary magazine. It was much bigger than it looks here.
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The Paragon was one of the most remarkable speakers ever
produced. It was housed in a single cabinet some 9’ long and weighing about half a
ton. The middle section consisted of a large curved wooden panel, and on each side a
series of three horn drivers were aimed at it. The stereo effect was created by the sound
reflecting off this curve.
Just the look of this all-teak wonder was enough to give
your testosterone a lift, but we realized that, given its cost, we should at least do some
listening comparisons to see whether our recollection of its sound was valid. It seemed
advisable to compare it to something we knew well, so we chose the venerable Acoustic
Research AR3as, largely because Brian's family's stereo contained them and we were both
familiar with their sound.
The store agreed to rearrange its listening room to put the
ARs beside the Paragon, and to wire it up so we could switch back and forth between them.
What they didn't do, whether through intention or ignorance, was make any compensation for
the differing sensitivities of the two speakers.
It's well known that, in a direct comparison, if one
speaker is slightly louder than the other, even if we don't register it as a level
difference, it will sound somehow better. Consequently, anyone running a meaningful
speaker comparison must make sure the speakers are putting out the same volume of sound.
The AR speaker was an acoustic-suspension design and
notoriously power hungry. The Paragon, on the other hand, was extremely sensitive, like
all horns. The store made no allowance for such differences.
As a result, when we had been listening to the AR loafing
along at a comfortable level for a while, and then switched in the Paragon, it practically
blew us off our chairs. Add to that the difference in character -- the AR had a somewhat
muted, "polite" sound, while the Paragon had a real in-your-face presence peak
-- and the Paragon's drama was confirmed.
Nowadays, such a demo would send me running from the store,
but back then, Brian and I loved it. It was only after years of exposure to the best the
audio world had to offer that I admitted to myself that the Paragon, while truly
remarkable in its own way, was a terrible-sounding speaker. We'd been had!
Sometime after the fateful demo, the salesman told Brian
that he had been awarded a plaque for selling a Paragon. I figure Brian should have got a
plaque for paying the bill.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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