#Cambridge soundworks by henry kloss drivers#
This corner speaker had four 5" drivers ("and 15 holes"), and sold for $25 (or $30 for the Deluxe Model "with a handsome frame and grill cloth"). In the early 1950s, Kloss built (but did not design) the Baruch-Lang speaker in his loft in Cambridge while he was a student at MIT. For the many people who so admired Henry Kloss, that wasn't long enough. When he retired his second Checker automobile after 14 years of use, Henry vowed to drive his new Mercedes diesel for 20. Longevity was another criterion, in what he built and what he bought. Kloss, informed by his own muse and unimpressed by fashion, created boldly original, straightforward, utilitarian products that lowered the price of performance. His newest radios, marketed by Tivoli Audio, have the simple, signature look of his KLH models, even down to their planetary dials. "Some of the particular things I have uld have and should have been done before," he once told me.Īfter leaving Advent, Henry started Kloss Video and, in 1988, co-founded Cambridge SoundWorks, for which he designed some three dozen products. Yet Kloss was genuinely modest about such achievements. That synergy made the medium truly musicworthy. He was quick to employ the transistor, which was crucial to the KLH Eleven's portability, and he ingeniously combined previously unrelated concepts with two Advent firsts: a cassette deck featuring Dolby noise reduction (which he had prodded Ray Dolby to adapt for consumers) and chromium dioxide cassettes. The speakers he built to fund that effort quickly became best-sellers. In 1967, after producing more landmarks, including the KLH Model Six speaker, the fine-sounding Model Eight radio, and a hi-fi system in a suitcase designated Model Eleven, Henry started Advent to work on projection television. That caused friction, leading Kloss, Low and Hofmann to break away and put their initials on a new firm. That led to the AR-1, the world's first acoustic-suspension loudspeaker system, with its relatively small enclosure and proportionally prodigious bass.īut Villchur remained home in Woodstock, New York, while Kloss ran the Massachusetts factory. Anton Hofmann, son of the great pianist Josef Hofmann, supplied $5000 in capital. Henry provided the facility, a cabinet and speaker-assembly shop he was already operating in a Harvard Square loft. In 1954, Villchur and Kloss founded Acoustic Research to develop and produce it. Stationed in New Jersey, he took a New York University night course in high fidelity taught by Edgar Villchur, who had conceived a radically new type of loudspeaker. Henry dropped out of MIT after being drafted. Instead, he used them to turn out enclosures for a speaker system an MIT professor and his student had designed.
As a boy, he was able to add rooms and bath fixtures to the Pennsylvania cabin he shared with his mother and two sisters.Īfter entering MIT in 1948, Kloss worked part-time for a contractor and bought woodworking tools to make furniture for his basement apartment. Habitually clothed in khaki trousers and oxford cloth shirts, their button-down collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled, Kloss (pronounced with a long o, to rhyme with "close") looked like someone familiar with tools. Henry Kloss, whose prolific hi-fi design and manufacturing career spanned a half century, died of a subdural hematoma on January 31, three weeks before his 73rd birthday.
Kloss was well known for his informal management style, dressing casually, and riding a beat-up bicycle through the streets of Cambridge.
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