The beginnings of home theater

  • Thread starter Thread starter Leonard Caillouet
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Leonard Caillouet

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Having been deeply involved in home theater since its beginnings in the 1970s, it is truly astonishing to see how far things have come. The quality in sound and video, the sophistication of the systems, and the low cost never ceases to amaze me. Sure, there are very expensive systems out there, but the cost of getting very high quality in AV has really never been lower.

So where did home theater get started? Well, if one were to identify one of the earliest points of departure from pure audio to the integration of audio and video into home theater, it would have to be with Henry Kloss' notion of developing low cost consumer projection television. Most everyone in audio knows that The Advent Loudspeaker (TAL) was one of the most popular speakers of the 1970s, and generally regarded as the value audiophile product of its time, but there is more to the story. TAL was actually developed as a high value, high profit margin product intended to finance Kloss' intention of building a low cost projection system. And for much of the 1970s it did just that. Advent produced the first consumer level projection television, the Videobeam 1000 and started delivering them in 1972. Selling for $2500, Advent was actually losing money on the product, and the speaker business made up the difference...for a while. Advent stuggled, and Kloss eventually moved on to start Kloss Video Corporation where he produced the Novabeam, which was intended to be a much lower cost product and easier to service and align. By the time it hit the market near the end of the 1970s, a small group of dealers across the country were beginning to put together Advent and Novabeam projectors with audio systems to create the first real home theaters.

The vision of Henry Kloss, and that group of audiophiles gone video dealers, really did change the consumer electronics industry and the movie business. As the first video recorders hit the consumer market, and movies started to become available for home use, it was becoming obvious that there was a demand for at home theater experiences. While Kloss focused on the video display, dealers who had been selling great audio for years started to merge the two. There were already crude methods in the 1960s to add ambient sound in rear channels using out of phase signals from stereo, and the demand for something like surround sound was growing.

I had the good fortune to get involved with one of those early pioneers in the industry. In 1979 I went to work for Art Colley's Audio Specialties & Video Home Theater. Art was an audio dealer that instantly got the idea of what home theater could do and became one of the first Advent, and later Kloss Video Corp. dealers. I had been a customer for several years and by the time I came on board, the Novabeam was coming to market. It wasn't long before the video tape business really took off and once we had program material to support it, the home theater was becoming a big part of the business.

Now the Novabeam happened to be an astonishingly good performer, when it worked, but it was a troubled product. While Henry Kloss was a creative genius and a great engineer, his insistence on keeping the price points low, and lack of quality control in manufacturing processes led to serious reliability problems. But the home theater cat was out of the bag, and others were beginning to produce competing products. As it turned out those reliability problems sealed my fate to to some degree, as I ended up being the one to repair many of the sets, and used my electronics training to fix, and even modify the Novabeams. Art Colley actually was the first to sell Novabeams on flat screens. We had to modify the convergence circuits to correct geometry, and while Kloss was skeptical, we knew that larger screen sizes and flat screens were the way to go, getting a more movie theater effect.

By the early 1980s there were several other projectors becoming available, though they were typically much more expensive, but Kloss was becoming irrelevant in the market because of continued reliability problems and financial problems. The home theater was off and running, though the major Japanese electronics vendors were skeptical about being able to sell it on a large scale.

More to come...
 
I started my career in 1978, the year Advent introduced the 710/750. Two years later I owned a 710 with a 6 foot screen flanked by Magnepan MG2 speakers with an M&K sub. We struggled with the blurry Advent 760, but were blown away by the Mitsubiushi VS700 Schmidt tube projector. The first mod we tried was to add a comb filter to a 750 to get some more detail.
I worked for Anderson Audio. We got the first Magnavox LD player outside Atlanta and immediately began demoing with Jaws discs. Saturday Night Fever came out and it sounded great on our theater room (Advent time delay running mid and rear time delay speakers). We had a full house for the Frazier- Ali boxing matches (the sound of those punches!).
Videobeams were for rich people and total video nerds. It took many years for big screen to make a serious market impact.
 
Sounds like you have a lot of the same experience I did. The Schmidt optics tubes were the sharpest by far but the small size of the phosphor did not allow them to produce the output to compete.
 
Great read, Leonard! It's interesting to get the take from someone who was actively involved in the 70s.

In 1979 you were getting your hands dirty at an installer... I was digging small tunnels in my backyard and filling them with legions of green army men! :T
 
Installing in bars and restaurants was the dirtiest. Much worse than digging in the yard.
 
You can't just drop that and leave... sounds like you have some interesting stories to share!

:olddude:

Yes?
 
Brightness was a big issue in the old days. To get decent contrast, the room had to be dark. Early Advent screens were spectacular, but then they introduced the "washable" versions which added a grain to the picture, we got a taste of how market forces were going to move video away from state-of-the-art. Screen gain was fairly high in the 6 and 7 foot screens, so windows were also a problem. I have one customer who still uses an Advent 6 foot screen for his data projector. I wonder how common that is?
 
I have not seen a curved screen used in a few years, but there were some larger ones made. With the interest in curved panels now, maybe there would be more interest, but I doubt it. The projectors are bright enough that the trade-offs in hot spots and viewing angles would probably not be something most would be interested in. The reason for the curved screen was the gain, which as you point out, is a problem itself.
 
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