Questions for Harvey G.

[SEAWOLF97]

Harvey

Its really been nice to have the "insider" anecdotes from your JBL experiences. I read that you were in QA and not production, but my simple questions are:

On JBL's speaker production line....1. Did an assembler do an entire speaker or just his component (like car assembly) ?? 2. Did they build more than one model simultaneously on a line ?? ( or just do all L100's then all L36's ..etc.)

yeah, I know..not earthshaking questions, but inquiring minds ......:)

thx
TOM

[Harvey Gerst]

Harvey

Its really been nice to have the "insider" anecdotes from your JBL experiences. I read that you were in QA and not production, but my simple questions are:

On JBL's speaker production line....1. Did an assembler do an entire speaker or just his component (like car assembly) ?? 2. Did they build more than one model simultaneously on a line ?? ( or just do all L100's then all L36's ..etc.)

yeah, I know..not earthshaking questions, but inquiring minds ......:)

thx
TOM
Okay, on Casitas, this was the setup:

At the very back of the building, in a room maybe 20' wide, by 8' deep, Howard Wieser would put in the round wire into our flattening machines, and run them thru the enamel (or varnish, or whatever it was) machines and then they'd go thru the drying end. It was really just one big machine, where the round wire went in one end, and the flat, coated wire came out the other end. That was against the very back of the long wall.

Across from that, was where Howard took the wire and made the actual voice coils on 4" or 2" or 3" mandrels, depending on the coils being made. He actually stood there and turned the wire on edge by hand and feed the wire onto these mandrels. Each mandrel could hold about 4" of coils which he'd cut apart into the right heightss.

George Martin and his crew (about 10 people, mostly women) were responsible for putting the voice coils on the formers and attaching the formers and spiders and leads to the raw cones.

Andre Kermins and his group (again, about 10 people, mostly women) glued the cones asemblies into the baskets and soldered the leads.

I may have that backwards, with Andre doing the cone assembly, and George doing the final stuff.

I'm sorry, but that's the best I can remember right now. As I recall, production wasn't that high; maybe 50 to 100 units at a time.

When I get a chance, I'll try to fill in the gaps about the magnet charger and the dome making machine.

[mech986]

Hi Harvey,

Thanks for the info on the driver assembly side. Did you know a couple of guys in the cabinet shop one named Vito Maffei and his brother Dominic who was a foreman there too?

I understand Dominic was there in the 60's through the 80's and worked on many of the big home models, and Vito started in 1971 and worked through the move to Northridge till his retirement in 1992. He also worked on many of the later mainstream consumer lines. Sadly, he passed away the next year after his retirement. Any rememberences?

Bart

[Harvey Gerst]

Dominic sounds familiar, but the cabinet shop was across the railroad tracks on Casitas, so, I didn't have much occasion to visit there.

When we were on Fletcher Drive, the cabinet shop was at first in a large metal Quonset hut (with a brick front) to the right of the main building, at the end of the block, right next to the L.A. River. After a few years, a larger place opened up across the street, and they moved the cabinet shop in there.

Ted was the cabinet shop foreman at the time. If we needed to talk to Ted, he was in the bar across the street most of the time. A few of the heavy drinkers at JBL would usually spend their lunch hour in that bar every day. Fletcher Drive was a logistics nightmare, with all the different operations scattered up and down the block in various buildings on both sides of the street.

Casitas Ave. brought everything together (well, almost). The small building (to the left of the main building's executive parking lot) became Customer Service, with me and George Augspurger, and the cabinet shop was in the large building across the railroad tracks, behind the main building. Casitas had actual loading docks.

Bill Burton and Bart Locanthi's R&D department moved from a small little room on Fletcher to a large space with a huge listening room on Casitas. That was in the front, on the far right side of the main building.

About a year or so after we moved to Casitas, Ed May joined us, and Bill Burton left to start Transducers, Inc., a JBL subsidiary, making high powered custom systems for the military. After a couple of years at Casitas, Bart Locanthi left JPL and came to work full time at JBL.

[Don Mascali]

Thanks for taking your time to write these experiances down for us. I find it very interesting.

Almost like talking to the patriarch at a family reunion and getting the inside dope on the black sheep.:D

[3dbdown]

Hi, guys. Rick here.

I thought I might pick up on Harvey's description of transducer production at Casitas.......

After the cone/coils were assembled, the were stacked, inverted, by type on wooden "closet pole" mandrels with large dia. bases, and hung on hooks near the assembly station. They would then be brought to the great women on the assembly line. The first process involved removal of the Avery label from the Frame/Magnet structure. This sticky label was placed over the voice coil gap by the guys in the magnetizing room to prevent particles from being drawn into the gap after magnetization. She would then sweep out the gap with reversed masking tape folded over a stiff piece of fish paper, and drop in the cone/coil assembly and the centering strips.

Next, the speaker was placed on a simple turntable. The frame structure had pre-installed adhesive on the spider and compliance surfaces, and she would activate the glue with solvent, spin the speaker, and gingerly attach the spider and compliance to the frame.

Then, the leads were soldered to the binding posts, the frame gaskets were installed, the centering strips removed from the gap, and the dust domes were installed. At this point, the leads were not yet covered with Bostick. That was part of our job in QA. It allowed for possible repairs if the speaker failed QA testing.

Then, the speakers ran through an oven on a metal conveyor, to cure the glue. Still on the conveyor, they passed over a couple of simple house fans under the conveyor to cool off on their way to me in the QA booth.

I would set up the freq. generator and power, according to whichever speaker I was testing. They rolled under the curtain to me, I hooked them up, and ran my tests, looking for rubs, chips-in-the-gap, compliance ticks, cone-cry, etc. etc.

If they passed, I glued up the voice coil leads along the cone, placed my QA Stamp on the frame, and if necessary, installed everybody's favorite red wax seals.

I would then stack them by my door, and one of the production folks, usually Scott Klynas, would come get the batch and take them to the Foilcal bench. Foilcals would be installed, the speakers placed in large open wire baskets, and moved to the loading dock. Then the trucks transported them to Airway, which was the furniture factory while I was there, about a mile or so up San Fernando Road.

They would then be loaded into cabinets, or indvidually packed, and then sent into finished goods.

The compression drivers were obviously assembled on a different line, because of their unique features, and didn't require the oven bake. So I could take my time with them!! Nothing worse than slowing down, not paying attention, and having a couple LE-15A's fall off the table onto the floor of the QA booth!! I could stop the conveyor, if necessary, but I couldn't regulate the speed! It wasn't a big deal on the big ones, but boy, those LE-5-2's could really arrive in waves!

We made one particular driver at a time, in whatever quantities were required, say between 20 and 50.....But we usually did up 5 or 6 different models each night. Lots and lots of LE-5's, LE-8t's, 123-1's. Not to mention tons of D-120's, 130's and 140's.

Moving north out of our building across the loading dock was the machine shop and mag room. Machining was done at the north end, followed by the paint shop, and then the magnetizing room as production moved south towards our building for final assembly.

During lulls while the girls set up for different models, I would mic magnets, pole pieces, and phasing plugs, and mark them with their tolerances and box them up. They would then be taken to the assembly area in the mag room, where the various tolerances could be matched up for the assembly wthin required tolerances. Then, they were magnetized, and allowed to cool.....That mag machine REALLY heats things up!! You just about need asbestos gloves to handle them, and they take some time to cool before being brought over for final assembly and QA.

Anyway, sorry to ramble, but it's hard not to when you are a True Believer.

Rick http://audioheritage.org/vbulletin/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Doc Mark]

Evening, Friends,

I dearly LOVE reading all this stuff!! "True Believer", indeed!!! :applaud::applaud::D As you both have time, please keep these "rememberings" coming our way!!

I once got to attend a lecture by a JBL fellow, whom I believe was John Eargle (sorry if I mispelled that). I still have the notes I took that evening, and I treasure them! I'm sure that all that info is just the "same old basic stuff" that you all know, already. But, for me, that night was super special, and I'll never forget how much I enjoyed being in the crowd! Thanks, again, Friends, and God Bless!

Every Good Wish,
Doc

[Don Mascali]

"Anyway, sorry to ramble, but it's hard not to when you are a True Believer."


Ramble on friend, we're listening...

[Harvey Gerst]

Hi, guys. Rick here.

I thought I might pick up on Harvey's description of transducer production at Casitas.......
Wow, Rick, sounds like they really automated a lot of stuff after I left. We didn't have assembly lines when I was there, just little roll around carts that held the speakers to be tested. Final assembly of speaker systems was done right there, in front of the QC booth.

[3dbdown]

Hi, Harvey....

Well, yeah, the real estate was about the same, and it was all still done right in front of the booth....maybe the oven was new, but the girls still used that 20 foot long table to assemble the speakers prior to placing them on the curing conveyor. The carts were still used to bring the compression drivers to us as well.

About the time we got ready to move to Northridge, Bill rushfeldt and George Barmaksezian developed the idea of an automated sweep of the speakers, and comparison against a printed curve to size up the speakers, but it was slow to take off. Not that they didn't trust our ears anymore!!

Later, the QA booths (Yes, plural!!) were fitted with Oscilloscopes with superimposed curves right on the screen, and test fixtures were developed for the various driver shapes, and it was then truly automated. Remember the wood and cardboard box fixture we used to test the 075's, LE-20-1's and such? You put it in the box, gave it a quarter turn to make contact with the terminals, and ran the sweep? That was about as high tech as it got, and we had to re-build the thing every couple of weeks!

Later, in the late 70's, when the new building opened, they simply added more QA stations to handle increased production. Still, even with the scopes and curves, you had to have a human ears listening and eyes searching for the obvious mechanical defects that don't show on the scope.

I guess the biggest advantage to the new method was that it showed output and impedance variations that we really couldn't judge using the old school methods......Giving a lot more consistent product in the long run. After all, who wants a stereo pair that plays 3 or 4 db out from each other? My friend John Anderson wound coils at night, and would add or subtract turns measuring DCR or L or something after making the basic cuts.....but even that is not foolproof. And of course, the Lansaplas cones were all weighed after spraying, but it wasn't rocket science, and you could get a lot of variation. Subtle, maybe, but there nonetheless.

"Good Enough" was never OK for us.......It had to be "Good".

:applaud:

[SMKSoundPro]

Tell us more!

Scotty.

[scott fitlin]

Hi Rick, GREAT STUFF! " TALES FROM THE FACTORY "! :applaud:


Later, in the late 70's, when the new building opened, they simply added more QA stations to handle increased production. Still, even with the scopes and curves, you had to have a human ears listening and eyes searching for the obvious mechanical defects that don't show on the scope.



"Good Enough" was never OK for us.......It had to be "Good".

:applaud:"GOOD ENOUGH" SIMPLY WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH! It had to sound "RIGHT", and it did, it really did. :bouncy:

That so many JBL drivers, designs and other things from the past DID and STILL DO sound so remarkably and amazingly GREAT, doesn't surpise me at all. They, ( JBL ) were, simply GREAT products using GOOD materials, assmbled by PEOPLE that understood their craft and job thoroughly and KNEW what they were DOING and CARED about their finished pieces!

THE HUMAN BRAIN, EARS, and skilled Men and women!

I'll say this, though, and this I REALLY believe, OF EVERY AUDIO BRAND in existence today, JBL is still #1 GREAT!

:bouncy:

[Harvey Gerst]

Hi, Harvey....

Well, yeah, the real estate was about the same, and it was all still done right in front of the booth....maybe the oven was new, but the girls still used that 20 foot long table to assemble the speakers prior to placing them on the curing conveyor. The carts were still used to bring the compression drivers to us as well.

Remember the wood and cardboard box fixture we used to test the 075's, LE-20-1's and such? You put it in the box, gave it a quarter turn to make contact with the terminals, and ran the sweep? That was about as high tech as it got, and we had to re-build the thing every couple of weeks!

I guess the biggest advantage to the new method was that it showed output and impedance variations that we really couldn't judge using the old school methods......Giving a lot more consistent product in the long run. After all, who wants a stereo pair that plays 3 or 4 db out from each other?
"Good Enough" was never OK for us.......It had to be "Good".

:applaud:
I didn't have a fixture to test 075's; just my ears. When we got a contract for matched 075's, it tied up the lab all day, running curves on each driver, and matching the curves by hand.

One day, for fun, I used the interstation noise on the Fisher AM/FM tuner I had in QC and matched all the drivers on the cart by ear. Brought them into Gus (Ed May's assistant in the lab) to test, saying "I think these will match up pretty well". Turned out I had matched them all by ear; some to within a 1/4 dB.

After testing me on a few cart loads, they stopped using the lab, and Ed May told me to just keep my mouth shut about it. I think he just wanted his lab back, but we never heard any complaints from the buyer, and Gus would always test one or two pairs that I had matched by ear from every cart load. They always matched.

Ed and Bart used to have fun with people that brought in new designs for speaker systems. They'd bring me into the lab (or listening room), let me hear the speaker with music, and then hand me a blank piece of chart paper.

Most of the time, I could accurately chart the frequency response of the system, nail the port frequency, and draw an impedance curve of the system - all accurately enough to where you could superimpose the actual machine-run curves and they'd match up pretty damn well.

That's where I got the nickname "Hi Fi". Kinda like Ken Nordine's "What Time Is It?"* I guess it was from running sweeps and listening to this stuff 8 to 10 hours a day, 6 and 7 days a week for several years.

Since then, I've lost a lot of my hearing, but when I go to AES shows, I can still surprise a lot of people by identifying x-over points, out of phase components, and peaks in the systems I hear at the show. What's really weird to me is that some peaks are way beyond my current hearing range (and the surprised manufacturers usually confirm them), but I'll be damned if I know how I'm hearing them.

*Ken Nordine had an album called "Word Jazz" out in the late 50's and it was strange by any standards; this was one of the tracks from his album. You can hear it here:

http://www.imeem.com/zulu12/music/cMhMmN9J/ken_nordine_what_time_is_it/

And I don't mean any of this as bragging; I don't understand how I did it, then, or now. I just was able to do it. Ed and Bart simply accepted it and they couldn't explain it either.

[brad347]

maybe you're psychic! :applaud:

This is a cool read. Old JBL certainly was a fascinating company.

[Harvey Gerst]

maybe you're psychic! :applaud:

This is a cool read. Old JBL certainly was a fascinating company.
It was certainly a great mix of different personalities. George Martin was Jim Lansing's brother; both George and his wife worked there. Howard Wieser did voice coils from the old Altec days. Bill Thomas was a leader that we all would gladly follow anywhere. Ray Pepe was a force to be reckoned with. And the 3 design engineers (Bill Burton, Bart Locanthi, and Ed May) produced amazing stuff.

It really felt like a family; it never felt like just a job. When they finally gave me a key to the place, I would sneak in on Saturdays and Sundays to get ahead of my work load for the coming week. Bill Thomas would come in and try to make me stop working on weekends, but he eventually gave up.

Dedication? No, it was more like love. I loved JBL more than any place I've ever worked.

[brad347]

Dedication? No, it was more like love. I loved JBL more than any place I've ever worked.

That definitely comes through in the old products, too. It reminds me of Leo Fender-era (pre-CBS buyout) Fender guitars.

[Harvey Gerst]

That definitely comes through in the old products, too. It reminds me of Leo Fender-era (pre-CBS buyout) Fender guitars.
Not the same. Leo had a lot of housewives doing piece work at Fender; you got paid, depending on how many things you could make in a day. I worked at Fender with Harold Rhodes in the pre-CBS days. Forrest White pushed workers hard - totally different than JBL.

[brad347]

Not the same. Leo had a lot of housewives doing piece work at Fender; you got paid, depending on how many things you could make in a day. I worked at Fender with Harold Rhodes in the pre-CBS days. Forrest pushed workers hard - totally different than JBL.

That's cool to hear about the differences. All I know is that in both cases, the end-result was spectacular. P.S., I've played in Sanger... I lived for about 5 years in Denton, TX from 2000-2005, when I was getting my first music degree at University of North Texas.

[3dbdown]

Hey, Harvey.....

When you worked with Harold rhodes at Fender, did you know a man named Ray Tomko? He was supposedly part of the design team of the original Fender/Rhodes keyboard, and a fine jazz player in his own right. I worked with him at Anaconda Electronics prior to my time at JBL.....

Just wondering.

[Harvey Gerst]

Hey, Harvey.....

When you worked with Harold rhodes at Fender, did you know a man named Ray Tomko? He was supposedly part of the design team of the original Fender/Rhodes keyboard, and a fine jazz player in his own right. I worked with him at Anaconda Electronics prior to my time at JBL.....

Just wondering.
Nope, doesn't ring a bell. There was only me and Harold in the #6 Quonset hut (across the tracks, behind the other Fender Quonset huts). Leo would occasionally drop by, but that was about it.

[doodlebug]

Harvey, this thread of your experiences at JBL plus the attitude you report being practiced throughout the company reminds me of my years at Hewlett-Packard. Both companies certainly had that "engineer's engineering company" cachet in the marketplace.

When you report that you loved working there, I know exactly what you mean. My years at HP parallel that - glad to know it the value systems of these companies similar. Their old products certainly evidence it.

Too bad both companies today don't have those same value systems, which is always a complication of getting bigger and bigger.

I appreciate your willingness to share with us.

Cheers,

David