Speakers with a story

These Apogee AE-5 Speaker cabinets are not the newest or youngest. Far from. Some cabinets are older then the technicians handling them. So why would these cabinets still actively been used till this very day?

The awnser is relatively simple, they sound amazing and are almost unbreakable!

Apogee Sound

Apogee Sound (founded in 1985) has made several speaker setups for touring. Most of the cabinets they produced were designed and build in the late 80's and 90's.

Appart from some key charicaristics that Apogee cabinets have, they made matching processors for every speaker meant to be touring. And those processors are one of the bigger reasons the speakers still live today.

Processors?

Without getting too technical, lets see what makes these processors so special.

In general you have 2 types of speakers, known as "active" or "passive" speakers. The key diffrence is where the amplifiers for the speaker live.

Active speakers take power and a signal. The amplification of that signal happens inside the speaker cabinet itself.

Passive speakers - like these AE-5 cabinets - don't have any amplifiers on board. To get sound out of these speakers you need an external amplifier.

To make sure the speakers sound right, you use a speaker processor between the audio source and the amplifier. These processors take the incoming signal and manipulate it so that the speakers will be able to reproduce the sound as best they can. The risk in this however is that if you give them too much power, you'll literally blow your speakers up. That's how many speakers eventually die.

Active Processing

To prevent this inevitable doomscenario of someone doing something wrong with an amplifier and ruining your speakers, Apogee made their processors smarter. After the processor sends the signal to the amplifier, normally it goes directly to the speaker. Apogee however lets the amplified output return to the processor to make sure it's output is safe to send to the speakers. All in an effort to maintain stability and concistancy in the speakers.

And with great success! Some of these cabinets are over 30 years old yet still feature it's original components and sound better then most modern PA systems. All cabinets in our inventory are thouroughly checked, and have revieved some cosmetic upgrades over the years like new speaker foam or paint. But the fundement stays the same.

Nothing like old-fashioned durable wooden speakers