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It was in his humble Yorkshire home in Ilkley that Gilbert Arthur Briggs built his first ever loudspeaker in 1932. Located in the valley of the river Wharfe, in an area known as Wharfedale, he was to make the name famous around the world by the time of his passing, despite never having been formally trained in engineering. Instead, he began as a gifted, passionate amateur.The one-time cloth seller set up a small factory a year later near Bradford, to build loudspeaker drive units. It was family run affair, his wife Doris hand wiring and winding coils. Wharfedale Wireless Works won their first major order of Bronze drivers via a Bradford Radio Society competition, and demand rose up to nine thousand units per year by the beginning of World War II. His company had outgrown its premises by 1936, and moved to a larger factory, while the onset of war saw it producing transformers for Marconi. By 1945, it had sold 40,000 from a team of just twenty people and that same year the company introduced its first two-way loudspeaker. It featured a 10 tweeter and a vast crossover, and set the blueprint for other speakers to follow. Later products such as the Airedale with its sizeable hexagonal cabinet with drivers running Alnico magnets and an upward firing ambience tweeter proved best sellers.His famous book, Loudspeakers: The Why and How of Good Reproduction, was published in 1948. A short tome, it nevertheless proved a great reference work for budding speaker designers and hi-fi enthusiasts alike, and was reprinted many times. It proved so popular because it was written in plain English, making the black art of hi-fi reproduction and loudspeaker design surprisingly accessible. Needless to say, a series of others followedIn the fifties, Briggs started an audacious series of events comparing live and recorded music. Using Wharfedale loudspeakers and Quad or Leak amplification to play back an acetate just cut (live) of a band playing, the first demonstration at the Royal Festival Hall was a great success. The concerts spun off into a number of locations, from Bristol Music Hall and the Philharmonic Hall to Carnegie Hall, New York, Portugal, Hong Kong and Canada. These events used the largest of all Wharfedales, a three-way, nine cubic foot corner speaker which was sand filled and reflex loaded, running a W15 woofer. Sitting atop was a discrete enclosure featuring ceiling-firing Super 8 and Super 3 drivers, radiating forwards for an omni directional effect.In 1958, the sixty eight year old Briggs sold Wharfedale Wireless Works to the Rank Organisation. He retired seven years later, by which time he had overseen two major breakthroughs the pioneering use of roll surrounds around paper cones, and the launch of the first speakers using ceramic magnets. In 1967 the company announced its move to a vast 170,000 square foot factory in Highfield Road, Bradford. In the nineteen seventies, Wharfedale grew strongly, with a range of finely voiced, affordable products such as the Chevins, Dentons and the Lintons you see here. It also introduced the high efficiency E series, and the popular Isodynamic tweeter used in the high end SP series. By 1977, production of drive units was running at 800,000 per year.The Linton 3XP hails from the glory days of the brand as it was originally constituted. Selling from 1975 to 1978 for around 100, it was most peoples idea of a high end loudspeaker, even if in real terms there were plenty more expensive designs. In a hi-fi world where many speakers were single driver full range designs, being a three-way was a mark of quality. The Linton came in fine quality teak cabinets so nineteen seventies and had bright trim rings around the paper dome tweeter and isodynamic paper cone midrange driver giving them some visual drama. An 200mm paper bass unit took care of low end duties. The 3 in its name refers to the number of drive units, and XP was the name of the series Extra Power.Quoted sensitivity is 85dB/1w/1m, with maximum power input of 30W RMS and a nominal impedance of 6 ohms. The frequency response is 60Hz to 20kHz at -3dB.
The Linton 3XP was an attractive sounding speaker of its day. Its pleasantly rich and sumptuous and has a gentle, lilting musical quality that lets any type of music you play sweetly roll along in front of you. Driven from a reasonably powerful amplifier at middle listening levels its a surprisingly pleasant thing to sit in front of. It was Wharfedales ability to offer a big, well finished box with a commensurately impressive sound at modest price that give it grant commercial success over this period.
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Category: Sound and Vision:Home Audio and HiFi Separates:Speakers and Subwoofers
Location: Kingsbridge, Devon