Empire MODEL-108
A 12-inch woofer, a diffraction horn, and an 800-cycle crossover - sold as a component set, not a finished speaker.
Overview
The Model 108 was never a complete loudspeaker. It was a flat baffle board with four pieces of hardware bolted to it: a 12BW-1 low-frequency driver, a T-10 high-frequency driver, an 8-HD diffraction horn, and an X-825-1 crossover network, plus an AK-1 accessory kit of mounting hardware. Buyers who wanted a finished box bought one of the folded-horn corner cabinets separately. The company's own literature was blunt about it - the system was listed "less cabinet," and the dimensions of 27 inches high, 18 inches wide, and 12½ inches deep describe the baffle assembly, not a piece of furniture.
The 800-cycle crossover point is the number that defines this system. It's a low crossover by later two-way standards, so the 12-inch driver has to carry everything up through the lower midrange before the horn takes over. That makes the blend between the two drivers at the seam the critical part. Period testers cared enough to run square-wave analysis on the Model 108 specifically. HiFI-Stereo (August 1960, p.29) published square-wave response traces for the Audio-Empire 108 alongside the 88, noting that a perfect square wave would rise steeply and trace a rectangle, and that the 108's trace showed a slight bump - a visible artifact right at the crossover region.
What the Model 108 offered was flexibility. The same baffle and driver set could go into a folded-horn corner enclosure, or into a custom installation of the owner's own design. The company's literature describes Klipsch-licensed corner horn loading that uses the walls of the room as an extension of the reproducer. This is a very different proposition from a sealed box you carry home and plug in. It assumed a buyer with a corner, a saw, or both.
The pricing shows a modular system. Period literature lists the Model 108 at $160.00 less cabinet in mid-1952, and at $184.00 less cabinet by May 1953. That suggests either a price increase or a revision in what the package included. Wired into the Aristocrat folded-horn corner cabinet and sold complete, the same system carried a list of $265.00 in mahogany or $271.50 in blonde. So the cabinet roughly doubled the cost of the speaker.
Empire's own advertising billed the folded-horn approach as delivering "one full octave of added bass range with unprecedented efficiency." That's marketing copy. The physical description is more useful: the horn loading relied on corner placement, so the Model 108's bass performance was never a property of the baffle alone. Put it in the wrong room and the low end changed. The spec sheet never mentions that.
The Model 108 sat at the entry point of a three-tier line. Above it were the Model 111 DeLuxe, with a T-25 high-frequency driver and a larger cabinet allowance, and the Model 114 Super, built around a 15-inch low-frequency driver. All three shared the 800-cycle crossover philosophy and the 8-HD horn. The differences were driver quality and low-frequency muscle. The 108's 12BW-1 woofer is the smallest of the three, and the T-10 is the most basic high-frequency unit in the family.
Documentation on the Model 108 is fragmentary. The system appears in period catalogs and in at least one equipment roundup - Audio (January 1962, p.62) described a decorator-styled cabinet installation built around a Fisher 100-R tuner, a Fisher X-202 amplifier, two Fisher XP-2 speaker systems, and a Garrard Type A turntable fitted with an Empire Model 108 cartridge. Read that one carefully. It names a Model 108 cartridge, not the speaker system, and the two should not be conflated. The Empire name covered cartridges, speakers, and arms in this period, and the model numbers overlap in ways that trip up modern researchers.
What survives clearly is the component list and the price. The Model 108 shows how high-fidelity was sold in the early 1950s - as a set of parts, with the cabinet as an upgrade. Finding one complete with its original baffle board, crossover, and AK-1 hardware is the challenge. Finding one still mounted in its Aristocrat enclosure is rarer still. Buyers should expect to evaluate the drivers individually, since the 12BW-1 and T-10 are the parts that matter and the baffle is, functionally, a board.
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