Pioneer HPM-100 etc.

[jay]

Hi guys, it just occured to me that I haven't seen much if anything here about the Pioneer HPM series of speakers.

I'm sure you all know the story about how Pioneer hired away a JBL engineer (can't recall who - Ed May perhaps?) to finally make a competant system to challenge the American market.

Anyway, is there no interest for a reason? Are they not worthy?

I sort of consider the HPM's to be shirt tail relatives of JBL's, if not closer. :o:

[Don McRitchie]

The person in question was Bart Locanthi and he was JBL's Vice President of Engineering through the 1960's. The HPM series was originally developed by Bart, but they later became an all Pioneer design. The HPM100 is probably the best known system and was targeted directly against the L100. I thought it was quite good at its intended market. However, JBL moved on with the L166, L110, L96 and I preferred all of these systems to the HPM100. By the late 70's, the HPM series was going decidedly down market and that is when I lost interest.

You will find considerable interest on this forum to the other Pioneer speaker line that Bart was responsible for - TAD. This line holds more closely to the JBL legacy of large efficient systems and studio monitors that are the focus of a large proportion of this forum. Many consider the TAD drivers to be the highest evolution of that art (but not everyone :D ).

[tomt]

Bart,a true audio hero

http://www.sabl.com/~bart/bnl2/index.html

[SEAWOLF97]

I'm sure you all know the story about how Pioneer hired away a JBL engineer (can't recall who - Ed May perhaps?) to finally make a competant system to challenge the American market.

Ed May was hired away by Marantz in 1977

[Chip-HP]

Bart,a true audio hero

http://www.sabl.com/~bart/bnl2/index.html

FWIW the link doesn't work ... for me ...

[hjames]

FWIW the link doesn't work ... for me ...

Yeah it was posted 04-24-2005 -
thats a 2 year old reference to that site -
its apparently gone away ...
I checked the rest of the site there, but nothing public seemed to be audiophile related ...

[Tom Brennan]

Many HPM fans and much conversation can be found at Audio Karma.