Past meetings of the Society
October 2001

Featured Guests: Alvin Foster

Home: (617) 296-2622 Office: (617) 282-8335

This month our meeting will be held at the home of Alvin Foster, BAS founder and current Secretary. At the meeting, Foster will demonstrate and explain why he wound up making his own speakers and the reason for the extensive application of room absorption treatment. Foster’s dedicated listening room is located in his cellar; the good news is that not all modifications to the room have to meet the decorative standards required in the more public spaces/rooms in his home. The downside is that hard, concrete basement walls can cause severe bass anomalies if not treated appropriately.

The meeting will consist of a talk describing his main speakers, the TLD, and the accompanying Acoustic Suspension subwoofers. For the first time, BAS members will get to see and hear the world’s first and only speaker that incorporates and executes: (1) the Transmission Line principle, (2) a Line Source Ribbon Driver (six feet high), and (3) a speaker that is fully Dipole. The unique TLD speaker concept is proprietary and belongs to Leslie Williams; he has lectured the BAS on the subject of distortion and complex speaker/room interactions. The massive woofer system consists of four-fifteen inch drivers. They are nested in two corners of his listening room and operate at frequencies below 80 Hz.

BAS members are encouraged/urged to bring along their favorite CD. After the BAS ‘Open Session,’ a group of three will be directed to the listening room where their CD will be played back. It will be accompanied by a lecture on the Live-End, Dead-End room treatment concept and why Foster chose to reverse the paradigm.