Nostalgic Indian Audio Gear – HMV, Cosmic, EEI, etc

[Riaz Majid]

India had a number of manufacturers of audio equipment in the seventies and eighties. Cosmic, Sonodyne and Woodstock were known for their fine sounding speakers and amplifiers. Solidaire made some good amps. In my younger days I owned a a Sonodyne Super Jetline and SCR 4030 amps ,as also a Solidaire 40+40 watt amp. I confess that Solidare had the best bass! Arphi , Murphy of India, Nelco, Norge and Pulz also marketed some fine amps. A small(then) town like Jabalpur had Lallan Brothers who hand assembled 'Universal' brand Amps and speakers which could blow off ur ears! The good old days.

most of the cosmic speakers uses bolton woofers with has real good base

 

[adityapm]

most of the cosmic speakers uses bolton woofers with has real good base

Bolton speakers were of good quality in general, not specifically bass supportive only. I would classify them as good bandwidth drivers. Its the designer which puts up the bass etc. Cosmic have used a lot of Bush woofers also (5 ohms DC with curvilinear cones) in the 100/150 watt designs.

Cosmic products were designed with pre compensated (boosted) bass areas (around 50-150 Hz) in all the products. They were not flat. This was so b'coz the indian music's limited bandwidth dictated this pre-compensation in order to bring out the melodiousness for the untrained ears of the users then. But ofcourse at the cost of loss of power bandwith. Those times' listening habbits were also at lower volume levels. So it kind of suited the consumer. Rest of them like Bevox, Norge, Arphi, Sonodyne, Solidaire etc were all unbiased. The only speaker design of Cosmic, which was really as per the books, was the Covox-7000.