Electro-Voice 100S
The speaker that Electro-Voice's own mixer manual kept recommending by name - a small box designed to pair with the 100M.
Overview
The Electro-Voice 100S is a loudspeaker documented almost entirely through the manual and advertising of the mixer it was built to partner with. The surviving documentation for the 100M mixer-amplifier mentions the 100S by name in nearly every installation example. That tells you its intended role better than a spec sheet would. It was not sold as a standalone hi-fi product. It was the matching speaker for a compact stereo PA system, and the manual treats it that way throughout. The 100S appears as the default load, the recommended monitor, and the example used to explain impedance math.
The material available here does not document what the 100S sounds like, so no character gets invented for it. What is documented is that the 100M's designers considered it the natural companion for their mixer, and that the manual's stereo-PA walkthrough assumes two of them flanking the stage. Its role in the system was flexible: mains, monitors, or both, depending on how the installer set the Monitor/Main mode switch on the back of the 100M.
One more documented behavior shows how the 100S was expected to be used. It carries a warning. The extra low-frequency boost places additional demands on the 100M's power amplifiers and may cause premature activation of the anti-clipping circuitry, so the manual suggests using less boost if that happens. Read plainly, the 100S was a small speaker that needed help to reach down to 60 Hz, and the 100M was designed with a specific EQ curve to give it that help.
Reception and the Landmark 100
Period coverage of the 100S specifically is thin, but the system it belonged to got more. Electro-Voice marketed the 100M mixer and its companion speakers under the "Landmark 100" banner, and the trade press took notice. HiFI-Stereo (April 1971, p.108) ran a promotional page in which a roster of named reviewers - Oliver P. Ferrell, Julian D. Hirsch, Larry Klein, C. G. McProud, Julian M. Sienkiewicz, George W. Tillett, and Larry Zide - were quoted praising the Landmark 100, with the pull-quote "the E-V Landmark 100 is easily the..." leading the layout. A later HiFI-Stereo advertisement (December 1970, p.138) invited readers to "peek under counters, behind displays, and around curtains at any E-V Landmark 100 showroom, to see where that great sound is coming from," and closed with the line that readers should not "rule out those little speakers." That last phrase is the closest thing to a contemporary characterization of the 100S in the surviving record. It is advertising copy rather than an independent verdict - E-V's own pitch, not a reviewer's measurement.
The Landmark 100 was a system, and the reviewers quoted in the 1971 page were responding to the system as a whole. Nothing in the available material isolates the 100S for independent test-bench treatment, so claims about its dispersion, its power handling as a standalone, or its behavior at high SPL would be guesswork. The speaker was common enough in installation work to appear in equipment lists years later. A Sound-and-Communication roundup (October 1990, p.54) listing gear for the Breslin Center includes Electro-Voice TL606AX satellites and TL606DX central cabinets, which shows the broader E-V install-speaker family stayed in service long after the 100M era. The 100S itself does not appear in that list.
Living With One
The practical case for the 100S today is the same one that made it useful in 1971. It lets you use the 100M's internal amplifiers the way they were designed to be used. The manual is emphatic about the load rules, and they govern whether a 100S survives its amplifier. That is the manufacturer stating a hard limit.
Wiring guidance in the manual is blunt. Shielded cable is described as neither necessary nor desirable for speaker runs. None of this is exotic. The 100S lived in a world of straightforward, serviceable PA gear.
The available documentation contains no pricing, no production dates, and no market data for the 100S on its own, so its collectibility is hard to pin down. It surfaces in the record as a component of the 100M system rather than as an object with its own following. Buyers looking at one should evaluate it as part of a 100M-based rig, on the same terms the original manual laid out: check the impedance of whatever you plan to hang on each channel, respect the 4-ohm floor, and remember that the speaker's documented low-frequency behavior - approximately 60 Hz with the 63-Hz equalizer slider at +3 dB - is the manufacturer's own figure, achieved with the mixer's help rather than by the box alone.
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