IUPUI Music Tech Blog

This week’s blog post is all about the main designer behind these speakers, Harry F. Olson, an accomplished inventor and researcher at RCA for a large part of its more experimental forays into audio and visual technology in post-World War II America. Olson was a key figure in the development of directional microphones, synthesizer technology, sound design, and so much more in a time of economic and industrial prosperity for the United States. After obtaining his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D at the University of Iowa, Olson was eventually hired as a researcher at RCA in 1940 and worked in developing the acoustic technology of RCA radios. This technology was initially designed for military use (World War II was in full effect, after all), particularly with underwater signal transmission and voice communication. When the war was over, his research team switched over to acoustic solutions for non-military usage, particularly for television broadcasts and sound recording. This led to the d

The CMI/IUPUI Speaker Project: Speaker Adoption It was a cold January morning when we pulled into the small storage facility that housed some of Classical Music Indy’s interesting collection of musical items. Operations Manager Tierney McGuire led us up to the smaller units that housed the focus of this semester’s project: two beautifully hand-made, wood-encased RCA prototype speakers, experiments in sound projection utilizing the entire wooden case as a medium for the sound to exit. These speakers, conceived in part probably by famous RCA designers Harry F. Olson and Jerome B. Halter, are one of a kind, with actual wood spliced together to make the perfectly round casing around the 15-inch coaxial speaker inside. Despite years of being shuffled around the city after their donation to Classical Music Indy, our department was contacted to possibly restore the speakers so that they could be used in performance. The RCA Speaker Restoration Project (name tentative, of