I am very appreciate of this museum, the organization is doing all music and technology enthusiast a great service with these preservation efforts and the presentations. These systems were not deigned primarily for someone's living room, they were mostly for theatrical presentations, so before you decide to judge them compared to some contemporary domestic system realize the design objectives for each were and are completely different. Even so, some people prefer these systems to what the modern hi fi designs have to offer. We listen and hear subjectively, with our mind - ears, not just with our ears so to speak, so individuals have to right to prefer some systems over others even when by instrumentation and measurement some other system may test as more accurate. And if you are a musician, what you are used to hearing on stage in a concert, orchestra pit, or chamber concert is also much different than what the audiophile thinks they should be hearing in their living room.
Where is this audio museum located? Of all of the WE speaker systems, this particular movie sound system of the 12 & 13 are the ones I’d love to hear. I’ve heard a few but never these which used something like 1-1-1/2 inch wide strips that were laminated into the shape of these horns, talk about massive labor costs! But these are very dense compared the plywood and sheet metal later horns.
While the audio is very good, I would suspect this far exceeds what performance was available at the time when they were in use in theaters, even leaving out modern recordings in stereo. Modern measurements means we know what drivers/horns blended well with others for full-range audio, not to mention that the drivers may have gone in for new diaphragms and such. Some people think these are better than what we have in modern times, while not realizing these setups are a product of those said times, and not representative of what was available back then. That said they far exceeded what cone speakers could do, probably even into the 50's and 60's.
