I believe it was 1971 when I was asked to provide a sound system for a graduation party for a friend i met in Prépa at Lycée Lakanal and was now attending Uni in Poitiers…
Two major events happened in that process which would have lifelong repercussions on my music reproduction journey…
The first one was when I endeavoured to get a loan of featured Pierre Clément linear arm professional turnable and I met Raymond Bernard, the 2IC of Monsieur Clément who had passed away the previous year and I was unaware of it… No internet or social media at the time obviously…
Monsieur Bernard, taken by my youthful enthusiasm for his baby, was so kind and generous to loan me one for a week…I don’t think i mentioned i was going to drive it 400 kms away 😜…
The second event was triggered by the fact that the room we were going to play music in was rather large and would require a large amount of speakers to get an even sound. Also as the PC turntable was only mono at the time, we decided to go for a mono system, and Monsieur Bernard may have supplied us with one of their amplifiers designed for the French radio ORTF.
So my friend was generous enough to give me some money to build 20 speakers for the event. So I did! 20 cubes of 30x30x30cm fitted with a Siare 17cm that I got from Cibot Radio most probably. No paint, no finish, just row rough plywood as mdf wouldn’t be available for several years.
Next thing you know, we pack all this in a Peugeot 204 Cabriolet…Don’t ask how we fitted all that in…Then we had torrential rain all the way to Poitiers arriving late to a Uni bedroom with was less than Spartan…
To cut a long story short, we set up the next day, attended the party, slept a few hours, packed and went back home the next day…It was not the best experience of my life to put it mildly…
Now, i didn’t mention that my future father in law was a successful panel beater and had a modern spray paint cabin…
And what one does with 20 speaker boxes left over from a party?
Well we painted them in automotive lacquer, white, black, red and yellow Porsche like our 204! Added Audax TW8 to each and tried to sell them! I didn’t know Renaud de Vergniette or Triangle at the time, but my first speakers were very similar to their first speaker, the CX2 in the third photo. Clearly Renaud didn’t have a FIL with a spray paint shop, as he used colour acrylic panels to finish the plywood box which had almost the same dimensions as mine, just a little deeper… And yes we did sell all 10 pairs to various people, one significant was a vinyl pressing factory near Mantes-la-Jolie… The rest as they say is history…
All 📷 lifted from the web
