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Author
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Topic: Drive In Speakers
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted December 27, 2011 11:24 AM
What I Got For Christmas
I decided to sneak a little bit of cinema themed decor into our shared home cinema/living room/dining room. One thing I thought would be really cool would be to add a drive-in-theater speaker.
Back in the golden days of the Drive-Ins these metal cased speakers would hang on the windows of the cars in the theaters and hang on poles between shows. Drive-Ins these days are basically all FM stereo, so these are pretty rarely used in the few places Drive-Ins even exist.
I have this theory that you simply can't have enough speakers in your home cinema sound system, and somehow justified to myself that if I had a small speaker on the end table next to where I sit I could turn off the rest of the symphony while other people in the house are trying to sleep, and the perfect candidate for this desirable (...and completely unselfish) addition would be a drive-in speaker. (Either that or I just wanted one...)
So I started looking on E-bay and found tons of them, in various states of repair ranging from cheap (dead) ones to shiny mint condition (expensive) ones. They even had paired ones on storage poles, but this is a little over the top for my living room.
I thought about buying a dead one and fixing it up. The quest for parts lead to a seller in Tucson and this discovery of a brand new unit for a middling price:
RCA Style Drive-In Speaker
It turns out these are popular among owners of classic cars: they display them with the speakers on their windows at car shows.
Being not easy to shop for I added it to my Christmas list (...again: just trying to help others!) and my wife bought me one for Christmas!
It is larger than I expected and my wife has declared it (ummm) "ugly", but I promised I will provide a tasteful display mount and we can hide it when her friends and family are in-house. (Maybe I'll take my speaker and we'll BOTH become scarce!)
The other thing is my audio system is designed to take either a monaural or stereo audio signal and provide a two channel input for my amp. Somehow I now need to derive a monaural, amplified channel from this and have it available even with the stereo speakers off. I'll be buying parts soon!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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