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Equity Sound Investments
Equity Sound Investments was founded in Toronto Canada in the 1980s as a corporate identity to offer two proprietary loudspeaker product lines along with Canadian distribution of the Intersonics ServoDrive subwoofer line. As Equity Sound ramped up, founder Steve Hutt had help from Tom Melzer & Marcel Didier, and two talented Candaian lads, Paul Gonsalves and Rob Robbins who each invested much more than they ever received (thanks guys). In April 1996 Steve moved on to Harman International's automotive division and his good friend audio systems master, Roger Robinson briefly stewarded GANE Loudspeakers. The Equity Sound identity was pretty much on hiatus until 2006 when Steve left Harman to be an independent insultant and resurrected his old 'corporate' identity. The GANE Loudspeakers and BOND Electro-Acoustics brands are not currently active, though a re-emergence is under consideration..... ah.... maybe..... doubt it.
The concepts for the Equity Sound loudspeaker designs were forged during literally more than a thousand live sound reinforcement engagements starting in the mid-1970s when Steve worked an average of 200 dates per year. Right up until he joined Harman in 1996 Steve provided live sound and mixing services for mostly acoustic music, folk, jazz and some rock provided a unique opportunity to explore and ultimately define various loudspeaker designs and prototypes.
GANE Loudspeakers (Fluid-Cooled) were a low price M.I. series of P.A. loudspeakers aimed at musicians, DJ's and clubs etc. but interestingly, with our ability to do customization they found their way into some unique installations. We didn't publish much literature and curiously, export sales outpaced domestic sales. We think this was just based on reasonable performance at good value and respect for North American made products. All woofers utilized ferro-fluid cooled voice-coils which allowed the use of amplifiers with high headroom to dramatically increase dynamic range. The G118, an 18" woofer in modest size enclosure (~1.7M3) rated at 600 watts was particularly popular.
One of the things that made the GANE systems work so well was careful attention to the woofer design and especially driver assembly. Great care was taken to develop and control processes that defined the bandwidth: Specifically the type of adhesive and how it was applied to the cone at the voice-coil attachment was critical for correct voice-coil decoupling as the frequency increased above the cross-over to high frequency horns. This design and manufacturing process provided the woofers with a perfect 2nd order low pass filter, in effect moving much of the system "voicing" technique out of the crossover and into the transducer for true minimum phase alignments.
Most of the Gane product line was typical MI 2-way systems with fuzzy carpet. But after receiving interest for installation finishes to emulate the competition the TL line was developed. (T = trapezoid, L = Lacquer)
Key installations utilizing GANE Loudspeakers:
New York Skyride in the Empire State Building.
Canadian Department of Defence R & D Lab, Downsview, ON.
Laurentian University Pub
Top row left is a composite of the Gane TL Series, upper left is 12TL, lower from left is 10TL + 12TL on G118TL all with grills, then with grills removed.
GANE 10TL, note the 'fly-ware' plates on the sides. (Styled after a popular Petaluma CA product.
GANE G118 in standard road carpet. This 18" ~63ft. 600w subwoofer was pretty popular. The motor/voice-coil combo provided enough kick (~96dB/w), but in conjunction with a moving mass vs. suspension that was slightly under damped, it had more apparent deep lows than some of the competition.
Canadian Department of Defence R & D center, Downsview, Ontario.
(formerly DCIEM)
Pic & graph is from the paper: Effects of Integrated Hearing Protection
Headsets on the Quality of Radio Communications by Ann Nakashima & Sharon M. Abel, DRDC Toronto. The photo & graph shows their acoustic chamber with loudspeaker system.
GANE B218: in DCIEM Reverb Chamber
Equity Sound originally manufactured and provided 4 ServoDrive Bass Tech 7s to the DCIEM acoustics lab to provide 32Hz to 80Hz, then about 2 years later received a request for quote for supplementing the system to provide >124dB SPL down to 16Hz. As far as we know, the only competitive bid was from the company that makes the 'ELF' integrator, an electronic filter that the DCIEM engineer was a fan of. Recognizing that we would be operating in a small revererant room it was obvious that a vented ~35Hz box was wrong. So, for a demonstration we modified a G118 to be a sealed enclosure and loaded it with a custom built 18" driver driver designed for long excursion and low resonance frequency. The result was that we produced more than 3dB output at 16Hz vs. the competition's double 18" (that's 4 x the acoustic power outper per driver). The custom 18" woofer utilized a unique reciprocal double spider and extensible surround that allowed for ~38mm linear excursion.
BOND Electro-Acoustics
The BOND loudspeakers were "Pro" audio systems designed for maximum output from a minimum size.
- These systems used an active cooling system to all but eliminate thermal power limits & compression.
- The power cooling concept for moving voice-coil loudspeakers was licensed from Intersonics Inc. based on Tom Danley's patent US4757547.
For a thorough technical explanation of the BOND Power Cooling look at Steve's AES Preprint 3191:
Power Compression Elimination in Moving-Coil Loudspeakers by the Use of Fan-Actuated Forced-Air Cooling
Go to the "White Papers & Patents" page to download.
The BOND DF-12 and DF-12M played stupid loud when run at full throttle.
- Sonic quality was pristine, even at ridiculous loudness.
- Output of the DF-12M (12" woofer / 3"Ti HF Driver) co-ax floor monitor bi-amped 800w/channel, measured after >30 minutes at 1m achieved ~133dB peak with recorded music. That's not a calculated result, it is a B&K sound level meter peak-hold measurement with the tester wearing hearing protection!
- next generation of BOND Electro-Acoustics loudspeakers are 'under consideration'.
Below are scanned copies of the original BOND Electro-Acoustics brochure (front and rear) c1991, design and layout by Dominique Whelan. I still have one of the solid granite enclosures. The granite enclosure is pretty cool but we never sold any.
NSCA - Cincinatti, OH, 1991
Equity Sound shared a booth and demo room with Intersonics/ServoDrive.
There's quite a story in the background to exhibiting at our first U.S. trade show. Fact is, we were way behind schedule assembling the latest iterations of the BOND DF-12 loudspeaker systems. In order to get to Cincinnati from Toronto with (only) four operating demo units, numerous coax driver sub-assemblies were built in the weeks ahead of the show dates, but time ran out when we had to load the truck! So, with pretty much everything organized we departed Toronto around midnight ~36 hours before show opening, planning to stop along the route to load the drivers, power cooling components, connectors and all into the enclosures somewhere the next day. Only the perseverance and dedication of Rob Robbins and Paul Gonsalves made it possible to get those boxes loaded (literally over a White Castle slider lunch break on the side of the road) and delivered to the demo room. The demo setup was pretty cool, and darn impressive. Our Intersonics friends Tom Danley & Tom Melzer had pulled favours with pals at Crown to loan us a rack of "Macro-Reference" and other awesome Crown power amps. We ran the ServoDrive SDL-5 under the BOND crossed over at 80Hz. With DF-12s on stands sitting over an SDL5 on each side of our stereo setup, the sound was impressive.
I found this NSCA certificate stuck in an old file. Sort of funny. Equity Sound Investments was barely a company at the time (or ever for that matter). But kudos to NSCA for those early days when they limited booth size so that the big companies could not 'swamp' the little companies with floor space. And the demo space pricing was super cool & affordable.
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