Darrel Sheinman’s Voigt Domestic Corner Horns
I first became aware of Darrel Sheinman when he invited me to Gearbox, a mastering studio and record label he set up in 2009 The studio is very unusual in using vintage tube gear to master vinyl with a 1967 Scully lathe and tube powered tape recorders and amplification. He has released a wide range of albums since the label’s beginnings and is clearly a big fan of classic audio gear, but he appreciates that modern tube electronics are useful too, the Gearbox studio featured Audio Note speakers and amplifiers when I visited.
Darrel has recently become fascinated with Voigt loudspeakers, particularly the Domestic Corner horn, a quarter wave design that was originally introduced in 1934. Paul Voigt is one of the great unsung heroes of British audio engineering, a man who was responsible for some of the most fundamental elements of loudspeaker design. While working at Edison-Bell in the 1920s he developed and patented the moving coil speaker in August 1925. Voigt was beaten by Rice and Kellogg by six weeks to be the first to patent the moving coil speaker. By 1926 Voigt had developed an electrical recording system which utilized a moving coil cutter head, this was used by Edison-Bell with great success.
In 1927 he patented the Tractrix horn contour, which he used in the Domestic Corner Horn design. The Domestic Corner Horn is five foot, three inches high and is two foot long on each rear wall. Between 1934 and 1950 341 Domestic Corner Horns were produced. When Voigt moved to Canada in 1950 he licenced Lowther to carry on manufacturing the Voigt Domestic Corner Horn cabinets.
The Domestic Corner Horn is an unusual loudspeaker by todays standards, it employs a single full range driver. In Darrel’s pair a Lowther PM2C driver fires into a concrete reflector and upwards into the mid/high frequency horn. At the top of the cabinet, a 90 degree reflector directs the sound into the listening room. The rear of the drivers cone is loaded by a quarter wave bass horn, which exits the cabinet at floor level. The driver is easily accessed by removing a panel on the front of the cabinet and a side door on the bottom of the bass horn.
The speaker cables connect directly to the driver’s terminals as there is no crossover in the design, the overall system has a very high sensitivity to suit the low powered amps available at the time of its conception.
Darrel drives the Corner Horns with a pair of Klangfilm V403A cinema amplifiers (in rather more domestically acceptable casework than the originals). These have a pair of triode ‘strapped’ F2A11 pentode valves (usually used in push-pull) in the output stage that produce 15 watts. The amp has EF12 driver tubes and an EZ212 ‘ghost valve’ providing rectification, it’s called a ghost valve because the identity of the original valve used is no longer known. All the valves are Telefunken types as per the origins of these German equivalents to Western Electric amplifiers of the same period. The control knob adjusts output via a Daven stepped attenuator because these amps have particularly high sensitivity that needs to be reined in for modern sources.
The preferred source in the system is a bit of a rare bird, a Commonwealth 12D/3 idler wheel turntable from 1959. This is similar to an EMT 930 broadcast design but comes from Australia, its platter is so deep that you can see the motor sticking out of the bottom of the plinth, and that is at least six inches deep. The arm that Darrel has chosen to pair with it is a 12 inch Ortofon RMG-309 from the early ‘70s and this has an Ortofon SPU Century cartridge with walnut body and integrated headshell on the end. Signal from this moving coil is stepped-up by an Audio Note AN-S8 transformer and amplified by an Audio Note M3 RIAA valve phono stage with an upgraded ECC7119 valve in the line stage.
The digital side is more straightforward and consists of a Pioneer Stable Platter CD player and Gold Note DAC 7 converter, interconnects are Mogami and speaker cables silver Audio Note Sogon. The preamplifier used to be a classic Marantz Model 7 valve model but that was usurped by a Music First Baby Reference passive design because the system didn’t require the gain provided by the active design. Darrel used to have Tannoy Arden speakers in the system with 15 inch drivers but was won over by the Voigts almost as soon as he heard them, and it’s not hard to hear why. Rarely have I heard such an effortless and refined sound from a system that can also do power and low frequencies in anger. He proved the last point with a jazz rock piece by Gary Willis on an album called Bent, I was startled to hear so much welly and dynamics from a system that I expected to be airy and open. I heard these speakers in a totally different system many years ago and we didn’t play anything so uncompromising.
With the acoustic sounds of the TLF Trio from France (Sweet Harmony) the sound was as open and natural as you could ask for, apparently the Corner Horns were designed to produce sound above the listener as is the case in a concert hall, and even in a room with a glass wall to one side there was no sense of hardness, just the presence of three instruments with the reverb applied or captured in the studio. A Julia Holter track World sounded even better, her voice being truly ethereal yet imaging clearly and sounding fabulous, apparently it was vocals that convinced Darrel that these were the speakers for him and it’s easy to hear why.
Possibly my favourite Gearbox releases is My East is Your West by Sarathay Korwar, this is a live performance of some great jazz tunes played by a large band playing Indian instruments in a reverberant church acoustic. Here it sounded more relaxed and natural than I am used to yet also highly detailed with a hear into it quality that was extremely engaging. This is a system that doesn’t have to try, it produces a sound that expands into the room in such effortless fashion that you can easily have a conversation even when the level is quite high, it must be very easy to live with and enjoy.
Sunson from the live Tripping with Nils Frahm album was particularly good too, it’s a big wideband sound and suits this system really well. Quite the opposite is Schubert’s Trout Quintet, Decca’s first SXL release (2110) which was recorded in an unusually dry acoustic and also worked supremely via the Voigts, prompting Darrel to question whether more recordings should be made without reverb in this way.
This is a fabulous system that reveals why Paul Voigt is so highly revered by the small coterie of enthusiasts that are aware of his work. One crusader in this area is John Howes who runs a small museum of Voigt loudspeakers in East Sussex, was introduced to Darrel by Voigt enthusiasts Jorg Mohaupt and Thomas Harding. Darrel was leant this pair of Corner Horns by Tom, and tracked down a pair of his own from John, which are now being refurbished by Lowther. When they arrive he intends to use Lowther’s Alnico magnet powered PM4A drivers, but admits that he likes the sound from the ceramic powered drivers he’s using at present a lot, so it will be interesting to hear what changes when his own Corner Horns settle in.