Originally Posted by
altec board post
Altec had severe financial problems. As one part of the plan to survive, they wanted to take away EV's share of the guitar speaker market (!). Scott Leslie was the engineer assigned to design the speakers.
He did FFT tests and listening tests on EV, Celestion, and a bunch of others. Then he went to work on the ER's. I kept in close contact with him since I needed samples for Fender, Acoustic, Music Man, and others to try. It took over 6 months to put together what was supposed to be the final one. He ran the FFT anaysis in the lab and it looked real good. Then he loaded it in a guitar amp. In the listening room he played his guitar for probably 10 minutes. No talking, until he put the axe down and said "Thats sounds like s**t". I'm not a musician, but I agreed, and grinned from ear to ear. Both of us wanted ER's to be really good speakers. Thats Altec's legacy.
His was a gutsy statement; the VP's and above were desperate for big and quick sales. But he worked another 3 months or so before coming up with the final speaker design. It did sound somewhat similar to the EVM, because that's the sound everyone was used to. But not exactly the same, because then why would anyone want to change from EV? The OEM version speakers had no label, no fancy paint job, etc. A small run of OEM's was made for me to use as samples. The first production runs were brought out in retail versions as the ER10, ER12, and ER15.