Electro Voice Patrician 800 speakers

[Lindsayt]

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

They really look like a piece of furniture.

[Lindsayt]

[jammy395]

Yea..... wtf...... might be fine if ya live in a church........

Probably does Church organ piece's very well......

Would be handy if a couple plank's were placed on top of them, make's it easyer to paint the ceiling...

[terrybooth]

As Spock would have said, "Fascinating". Tell us more! I've found the following link (if it works)
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j ... 5579,d.d2k
30 inch bass driver! And a design that befits the age of the original (this link refers to the original being 30 years before, so does that make it the 1930s or 40s)
Most importantly, what does it sound like?

[Lindsayt]

...Most importantly, what does it sound like?

!

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

They definitely look as if they should be attached to a church organ. Or maybe a funeral home

I got it - the Munsters Hi-Fi :D

[Gromit]

You bringing these to Scalford Lindsay?

[Daniel Quinn]

put wheels on them and you can go in them , that down there south is all down hill :D

[Lindsayt]

I couldn't open your link Terry, but if you google "patrician 800 eds" and select the top link you'll get a pdf of the engineering data sheet for these speakers.

A few years ago I was browsing for information on my Bozak speakers when I came across a post on an American hi-fi forum from someone who used to work in a hi-fi dealers in the 1960's. His shop stocked Bozak, JBL, Altec, Klipsch speakers. One day an elderly gentlement came into the shop and listened to some of the speakers. You could tell by the expression on his face that something wasn't right.
"These are the top of the range from..."
"Yes, they don't sound very good."
They listened to all the best speakers in the shop and the gentleman still wasn't impressed. This piqued the shop assistants curiosity, so he arranged to visit the customer's house on his next day off.
When he arrived he found a pair of big old EV Patrician IV speakers. They played a variety of recordings. One that particularly stuck in his memory was a tape recording that a friend had made of a thunderstorm. These speakers were able to play this in an incredibly realistic way. More realistic than any of the speakers in his shop.


This post awakened a desire in me to buy a pair of Patricians if I ever saw them for a reasonable price. Reasonable in Patrician terms is still several thousand dollars. I wanted to become that old man. Someone who could listen to any speaker and say "They're not very good, are they?"

Although coming to think of it, I'd already become that old man before I got the Patricians when I visited hi-fi dealers and wasn't impressed with their multi-thousand pound amp and speaker combinations.


EV first started making speakers in about 1950. They started as a microphone manufacturer. The Patrician series was their top of the range speaker. A corner horn design licenses from Klipsch. The Patricians are upsized from Klipschorns. The 800 uses the 29 3/4" bass drivers with polystyrene cones. This crosses over to a 12" cone at 100hz, which crosses over to the 1824M midrange compression driver (this is the same driver used in my EV Sentry III's) at 800hz, which goes up to 5khz before handing over to the T350 compression driven tweeter. My understanding is that Klipsch used a cheaper and less extended EV tweeter in their Klipschorns. Manufacturer quotes a frequency response of 15hz to 23khz - no plus or minus db figures. Looking at the data sheet of the 30w drivers it's likely that they start rolling off at about 22hz.

The achiles heel that I've found with horned speakers is the bass. Compression drivers are more efficient than conventional domes. It's difficult to get a neutral tonal balance without some sort of compromise. The Patricians tackle this by using huge bass cones in a horned enclosure, ideally using the corners of the room as an extension to the horn. Even so, the midrange unit and tweeter still need to be padded down to the level of the bass units. The 800's are about 102 dbs/2.83v/1m efficient. Impedance is nominally 16 ohms in the upper frequencies, 8 ohms in the bass dropping to a minimum of 5 ohms.

One trade-off with this design is the 3 crossover regions from the 4 way design, but at least there are no crossovers in the important 800hz to 5khz midrange.

The other trade-off is the size, but they are designed to be used 2" from corners which means that they intrude less into the room than typical shoe-box sixed rear-ported modern 2 way speakers.

I've currently got them in a room that I'm decorating to give me an indication of how they might sound in the unfurnished conference room at Scalford this week-end. Echoey rooms don't do hi-fi systems any favours.