All American Tower Speakers

In this article, our experienced speaker builder takes us along with him on his quest to build a loudspeaker made solely from drivers manufactured in the United States.

- Ken Bird

About the Author

Ken Bird has had a 40-year engineering and product management career focusing on consumer, industrial, and telecommunications electronics. Ken retired to his native Missouri and now pursues his interest in building speakers and tube amplifiers, along with model railroading, amateur radio (WOKLB), and digital photography.

With the majority of raw speaker drivers being imported today I wanted to build a system using only drivers made in the US. That does not mean that there is a quality issue with imported drivers, it's just the opposite. The quality and workmanship of drivers made overseas is usually superb with state-of-the-art engineering and materials, but I wanted to see what was available in the US.

I began researching "American-made loudspeakers" on the Internet and found many listed but most of them made complete systems, and many high-end models that while assembled in the US, used imported drivers. I finally settled on a brand that I remembered from my early days in engineering with a major manufacturer of consumer electronics now long defunct. The manufacturer bought carloads of speakers from US manufacturers and one was a Wisconsin-based firm called Oaktron that had been established in 1957.