In 2000, TAD introduced its first speaker designed specifically for home audio use, the floorstanding M1, which featured the first incarnation of TAD's now-famous coaxial Coherent Source Transducer. Impressed with the reputation of TAD speakers, big-name musicians such as Jimmy Page and Prince installed TAD speakers in their private recording studios." "TAD speaker units were also used as part of a sound reinforcement system during the concert tour the Eagles made around Japan in 1979, during which the performance of the TAD speakers dazzled audiences. TAD's first product was the TD-4001 compression driver mentioned above.Īccording to the TAD website, that driver and its associated TH-4001 horn "found its way into famed recording studios around the world, including those designed by Tom Hidley, who was a top-rated acoustic designer of the time, as well as AIR Studios, Capitol Records studios, and Record Plant. In 1978, Pioneer decided to break into the professional speaker market with a line of all-out recording studio monitors manufactured under the name Technical Audio Devices Laboratories. Over the ensuing decades, Pioneer grew into a revered brand with a global reach. The company everybody knows as Pioneer was founded by Nozomu Matsumoto in 1938 as a radio store and speaker repair shop in Tokyo. It is exposing me to a level of fit'n'finish and sonic insightfulness that is rare among contemporary speakers, even at the highest prices. This time, though, it's a living roomfriendly, three-way, dynamic-driver standmount/bookshelf called Compact Evolution One Bookshelf Speaker System. Thirty years later, I find myself listening to a pair of brand-new TAD speakers, and once again, none of my friends have anything sonically or aesthetically comparable. That was my first experience with Japanese loudspeaker design, and it exposed me to a level of engineering precision and fine craftmanship I had not yet encountered in American-made speakers. I didn't keep the TADs long, because the friend who admired them most made me a very "friendly" offer. None of my horn-fanatic friends had anything sonically or aesthetically comparable, and all of them were envious. The TAD horn's smooth, micro-resolved response was a refinement upgrade from my multicell Altec horns plus, the TADs' French-polished wood looked radically less industrial than the soldered-tin, tar-filled 1005/288C horns they replaced. The most money I've ever spent on a pair of loudspeakers was back in the early 1990s, when I bought a pair of used TAD TH-4001 wooden horns and their associated TD-4001 compression drivers.
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