Rudy Bozak

125

Rudy Bozak : biography

1910 – February 8, 1982

Bozak met Emory Cook in the early 1950s; the two hit it off and began working in a shared warehouse basement facility in Stamford. Cook and Bozak thrilled the audio world in 1951 with Cook’s ground-breaking stereo recording of train sounds at night: Rail Dynamics. Together, Bozak and Cook implemented a stereo loudspeaker system that would be able to show Cook’s stereo recordings to best effect.

By the mid-1950s, Bozak had expanded into new quarters at 587 Connecticut Avenue in South Norwalk, with an export office in Hicksville, New York.

The foundation of Bozak loudspeaker design was the unique Bozak cone. The woofer cone was molded from a slurry containing paper pulp, lamb’s wool and other ingredients in a secret process. The cone was made thicker at the center, becoming progressively thinner toward the periphery. An additional doping of the inner area further strengthened the cone center. The result was a cone with ‘variable density’ from center to rim with virtually no breakup or standing waves, the major sources of distortion in more conventional paper cones.

The original midrange and tweeter cones were paper. In 1961 the B-209 midrange cone was changed to a radical new design. The material was very thin spun aluminum which took much of its strength from its curvilinear profile along the radius. The cone received a thin coating of latex in order to damp the surface reflections that otherwise would occur on a metal surface which is vibrated rapidly. The design was patented and was largely responsible for the superb transient response of the Bozak B-209B and B-209C midrange.

In 1961 the original B-200X paper-cone tweeter re-appeared as the B-200Y, using the same basic cone design of the midrange.

The Concert Grand was the crown jewel of Bozak speaker systems since its introduction in 1951. This refrigerator-sized speaker system originally contained four B-199 12" woofers, one 8 Ohm B-209 6" midrange driver and eight tweeters. The B-310 and B-310A were the mono versions in which the tweeters were arranged as a sector of a sphere for widest distribution of high frequencies. The ‘stereo’ B-310B and B-400 had the eight tweeters arranged in a vertical row. All Concert Grand models starting from the B-310A contained two 16 Ohm B-209 midrange drivers. The Concert Grand loudspeakers were designed to fill large spaces and were not at their best with listeners closer than 20 feet away. In 1965, a pair of B-410 Concert Grands cost US$2000. Such a high price limited ownership to a small number of hi-fi aficionados and audiophiles. The model line continued to be manufactured by Bozak until 1977. Henry Mancini and Benny Goodman, good friends of Rudy Bozak, owned Concert Grand speaker systems. Jack Webb put a pair in his Mark VII Productions listening room.

In 1961, Bozak introduced the B-4000 Symphony. This was sort of "half a Concert Grand," using two 12" woofers, one midrange and the same vertical array of eight tweeters as the Concert Grands. Again, the Symphony was considered to have better imaging than its "big brother" (which was also consider by some listeners to be bass heavy) but was at its best when listeners were no closer than 15 feet. The Symphony was eventually offered in four cabinet styles.

The backbone of the Bozak line was the B-302A system, offered in several cabinet styles over a period of years. The 302A systems consisted of one 12" woofer, one midrange driver and one tweeter pair. A ‘starter’ version, the B-300, was a 2-way system consisting of one 12" woofer and one tweeter pair mounted across the front of the woofer. A single capacitor sufficed as the crossover ‘network’ for the B-300. The system could be expanded to a 3-way B-302A by adding a midrange and full 3-way Bozak crossover.

Acoustic suspension arrived in the loudspeaker marketplace in 1955, making it possible to get low bass from a small, bookshelf-sized enclosure. This seriously affected the sales of "big box" speaker systems of all brands. Rudy Bozak never offered an acoustic suspension speaker system; he stated that the full transient response and clean bass for which his woofers were famous could not be obtained with the heavier, reinforced woofer cones necessary for acoustic suspension. Bozak began offering smaller speaker systems to answer consumer demand, but none were noted for exceptional performance until the LS-200 and LS-200A of the late 1970s.