'68 Silvertone AM/FM table radio

[maxhifi]

Originally Posted by Reece

Don't bother building a sweet sixteen! Back around 1961 or so I helped my bro-in-law build one. It took 16 - 5" speakers wired up series/parallel in some circuit to come up with 8 or 16 ohms, I forget which. It was quite disappointing. It sounded like an enormous 5" speaker! Lots of volume but no more bass than a 5" speaker. The theory was all those cones would move a lot of air and make bass, but all it did was make volume. The speaker has to have the frequency response to do it. You could stack up sixteen AA5 radios with 4 or 5 inch speakers and see what I mean.

That's cool you guys built one when the article was current! I didn't learn about the concept until about ten years ago.

I have done enough research on the topic to understand why it's a bad idea. An engineer from Jensen wrote a critique of the Sweet 16 a year or two after the original article which was published in AUDIO magazine. The engineer compared it to an inexpensive two way speaker made by Jensen, and found the Jensen speaker significantly better in almost every measurable way including size and cost. The only thing the 16 had going for it was efficiency, and midrange distortion was quite low.

My motivation behind wanting one tends more towards the experience of completing the project, than the ultimate result. That and the not so easy task of rounding up 16 close to identical 50 year old speakers.