Western Electric To Debut 777 rAMT Midrange Driver at High End Munich 2022

After successfully rebooting tube production in the US with the relaunch of the 300B, and introducing the stunning new 91E Integrated Amplifier, Western Electric has been busy in other areas. Charles Whitener, the entrepreneur and current president and CEO is determined to take Western Electric to a leading market position in home audio and is investing also in new speaker technologies. The first results will be visible at High End Munich 2022 with the presentation of the new 777 rAMT Midrange Driver.

A reinforced dose of everything that makes Voice Coil the Loudspeaker Industry must-read, the August 2018 edition features an updated directory on Voice Coil manufacturers, while James Croft reviews two patents directly inspired by the work of Dr. Oskar Heil on an Air Motion Transformer (AMT) woofer system. Finally, Vance Dickason characterizes three drivers in Test Bench, including the new Eminence Alpha-5-8 5” midbass driver; the TPL75, a compact pro sound AMT from Acustica Beyma; and a new pro sound compression driver from B&C Speakers.

At the High End 2018 show in Munich, I learned that there was this "very exciting and promising" new driver being introduced at the show. When we decided to visit the "Newcomers" exhibits, where new companies pitch their new ideas, inventions and, sometimes, actual products, we met British manufacturer Arya Audio Labs and we were pleased to find a longtime friend of audioXpress and Voice Coil, Arthur Marker, now in charge of this new company introducing AirBlade, a revolutionary loudspeaker driver!

In this article, Vance Dickason highlights a new transducer technology from Christensen Audio, which was recently introduced and has the potential to replace moving-coil driver types in many applications, both in terms of performance and cost. The new technology represents a radical improvement of the basic and well-known Air Motion Transformer (AMT) technology, as originally developed by Dr. Oskar Heil and ESS Labs in the 1970s. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, January 2016.