Electro-Voice Patrician 800
Thirty inches of woofer, a four-way horn system, and furniture-grade cabinetry that Electro-Voice advertised as the least spectacular thing it ever built.
Overview
The number that stops people is thirty. Electro-Voice built the Patrician 800 around a 30-inch woofer, and the company led with that figure in its own advertising rather than hiding it — a driver measured in feet, not inches, sitting at the bottom of a four-way system. High Fidelity (September 1968, p.21) carried the line describing the woofer as 30 inches in diameter, for sounds the listener could feel as well as hear. The same advertisement ran in HiFI-Stereo (February 1968, p.47), so it was not a one-off placement. Collectors who have moved one of these cabinets will tell you the ad copy undersold the logistics.
The driver complement was four-way, and the architecture is the interesting part. A 30-inch woofer handled the bottom. A 12-inch mid-bass speaker covered the range above it — sources describe the handoff as between 100 and 800 Hz — bridging the gap where a cone that large cannot move fast enough. Above that, a treble horn driver took over to roughly 3,500 Hz, at which point a horn supertweeter ran out to the top of the range. Electro-Voice's own catalog copy from the period names the T250 as the treble driver and a T350 as the supertweeter, with the latter operating from 3,500 Hz to beyond audibility. A frequency response of 20 to 35,000 cps was claimed, along with a program power handling capacity of 100 watts. Those are the manufacturer's numbers, and they should be read as such — period claims, not independently measured figures.
The physical scale of the thing dictated everything else. The enclosure was built of one-inch-thick wood throughout, and the cabinet measured roughly 30 by 17 by 16½ inches deep. It was offered in both traditional and contemporary furniture styling, finished in walnut, mahogany, or fruitwood, and the period advertising shows it paired with the matching Contessa equipment console — Audio (March 1963, p.84) and HiFI-Stereo (January 1963, p.17) both ran that pairing. This was not sold as a component. It was sold as furniture, and the ads treated it accordingly. The company's copy described the Patrician 800 as "devoted to the reproduction of sound with absolute honesty," speaking "only when spoken to," with a voice "no more spectacular — and no less so — than the music it is asked to duplicate." That is a remarkable pitch for the biggest speaker in the catalog: the flagship marketed as the least flashy item in the line.
The design rationale Electro-Voice gave for the enormous woofer was less marketing than geometry. As the company's advertising put it, the large woofer existed "simply because a system of this magnitude is required to reproduce the deepest musical sounds accurately and without compromise." Readers can decide for themselves whether that reasoning holds, but it is at least an honest engineering argument rather than a slogan.
Placement was flexible in a way the size might suggest otherwise. The catalog copy notes that the Patrician 800 was designed for utmost operating efficiency in a corner, but that it could be placed in almost any room location without seriously hampering performance.
The original price was $1,095.00, per the Electro-Voice catalog listing reproduced in the period press. Adjusted for what a dollar bought in the early 1960s, that put the Patrician 800 firmly in the territory of a used car or a very good piano. It was never a volume product, and the surviving record reflects that: the system shows up in classified advertisements decades later, and the asking prices tell their own story. A 1986 classified in Audio listed a walnut traditional pair at $4,000, F.O.B. East Syracuse — a figure that says as much about collector demand as about inflation. A 1981 classified in the same publication carried a single buy-offer for one unit, which suggests these changed hands one at a time as often as in pairs.
What the Patrician 800 is not, in the surviving documentation, is a reviewed product in the conventional sense. The period coverage is almost entirely Electro-Voice's own advertising and catalog copy — the company bought the space and made its case. There is no independent lab report in the record here, no measured frequency-response sweep from a magazine's test bench, no third-party verdict on how the thing actually sounded in a listening room. That absence matters. Buyers considering one today are working from the manufacturer's claims and from whatever a seller will demonstrate, not from a body of independent measurement.
For the collector, the practical picture is straightforward and unforgiving. The Patrician 800 is a furniture-scale loudspeaker built around a 30-inch driver, in a cabinet that requires a dedicated room and at least two people to move. The one-inch wood construction is a genuine asset — these cabinets were built to last — but the size is the whole story. This is not a speaker that gets rotated in and out of a system. It gets installed, and then the room is arranged around it. Anyone chasing one should expect to deal with the cabinet first and the electronics second, and should treat any surviving example as a restoration candidate rather than a plug-and-play purchase. The 30-inch woofer is the reason to want it and the reason to think hard before buying it.
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