Galaxy Audio
Galaxy Audio Speakers
By 1977, Superior Sound, operated by Brock Jabara and his partner Jim Pearce, had already logged eight years in the concert sound business. Banks of their cavernous black boxes flanked the stages of concert halls and arenas all over the country, providing sound for Aretha Franklin, The Bee Gees, Asleep at the Wheel, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Jean Luc Ponty, James Brown, and countless others. When Superior Sound outfitted a show, they supplied the equipment and the personnel. If something wasn't right, Brock and Jim heard about it then and there, they were the ones manning the board.
Superior Sound was on the road with Mike Finnigan, a noted side man (Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills and Nash) who was launching a solo career. Being from the same city (Wichita), Brock and Jim and Mike went way back. But that didn't stop Finnigan from complaining on stage anytime something in the mix failed to meet his standards. Sometimes in mid song he'd stop just to gripe, "I can't hear the monitors!" Brock and Jim were like survivors of a shipwreck, stranded on their mixing console island in a sea of rowdy concert goers with the main attraction berating them from the stage. "I can't hear myself! Turn up the (bleeping) monitors!" Even with 100 watts of power being pumped into each of the two massive floor wedges positioned next to Finnigan's keyboard, every night was the same, "Turn up the monitors!" The boos and catcalls began to have a decidedly negative effect on the crew's morale.
The challenge was to produce a monitor that could be head above any din. During a mid-tour break, Brock directed speaker builder Larry Schneider, at Superior Sound's Wichita shop, to cram 5-inch drivers four abreast in an enclosure that could fit atop a keyboard or microphone (mic) stand.
Back with the tour it was business as usual except for a single change in the on-stage monitor array. One channel, 350 watts, of a Phase Linear 700, was allotted to the skinny plywood cabinet that rested about three feet from Finnigan's face. The house lights dimmed. Midway through the first set the point at which Finnigan would customarily begin his nightly tirade about the inadequacies of the sound system, he paused to ask, "Could you please turn down the monitor?"
The guys from Superior Sound knew they were on to something. Still, a few bugs remained. Overloading the speakers with eight or nine times as much power as their drivers were designed to handle sometimes produced surprising results: like the time one of the prototypes caught fire (actually burst into flames) during a show. Occasional pyrotechnics notwithstanding, the world's first personal monitors were an immediate hit with the musicians who used them. It was obvious that with some refinement the new products could fill a long standing void in the marketplace. Superior Sound began to metamorphose from speaker rental company to speaker manufacturing company. Galaxy Audio was born.
Galaxy's first order of business was to ask our original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to construct drivers capable of handling significantly heavier power loads than the 10-watt models then being used. The OEM added features usually found on much larger drivers: nonferrous and heavy-duty . With improved power handling capacity two drivers could do the work of four, and the size of the cabinet could be reduced by half. Performance and quality were further enhanced when we began manufacturing our own drivers. Later, cooling (a process whereby a metallic emulsion is used to speed the dissipation of heat from the voice coil) was adopted, a change that resulted in an increase in the 5-inch driver's power handling capability from an already impressive 60 watts to 100 watts. That made it possible for each 8 pound HOT SPOT to easily accommodate (get this) 200 watts. A new word was introduced into the English language, "SPLOWT," speaker's splowt states the relationship between its maximum SPL and its weight. The HOT SPOT boasts one of the world's highest splowts: 19.8 bB!
The material being used to build the cabinets had its own limitations (other than flammability). Plywood HOT SPOTS looked like the kind of stuff being cranked out in countless garages and basements. Cheap copies began to turn up all over the place.
The second generation HOT SPOTS were reinforced with Fiberglass, which made them more airtight, infinitely stronger, and nigh unto impossible to bootleg. After Fiberglass came molded ABS plastic and the trapezoidal shape that gives the present day HOT SPOT its distinctive profile.
Today more than 275,000 HOT SPOTs are in use.
Used Monitors
Find used speaker monitors and stage monitors from popular brands as L-Acoustics, Turbosound, EAW and Meyer Sound. All used speakers we carry are warrantied and in most cases inspected by factory certified technicians.
Solaris sells and buys secondhand and used stage monitors and monitors for use in churches, clubs, theaters and other large events and shows. Call us if you don't find it and we will find it for you.
