UREI Model 813
The monitor that studios kept ordering by the pair - and that UREI's own advertising called the industry standard for control rooms.
Overview
The Model 813 is a control-room monitor speaker system built around UREI's Time Aligned crossover. It is one of the few pieces of studio gear where the marketing language and the studio logbooks agree. UREI's own advertising billed it flatly as "an industry standard for typical control room applications." That reads like puffery until you start counting the facilities that had a pair bolted into the soffit. The 813 shows up in room after room in the trade press, usually listed alongside a console worth ten times as much.
The design centers on an Altec custom 604 duplex driver paired with a UREI high-frequency horn, working through the company's 800-series Time Aligned crossover network. UREI's literature describes the combination as delivering extended and more uniform high-frequency response, with pressure-controlled apertures handling damping. The company claimed high efficiency and low distortion as a result. The advertising copy promised "unbelievably clean reproduction from low levels to the threshold of pain." That is the kind of line that usually earns a raised eyebrow, but the 813's reputation rested on exactly that: a big monitor that stayed composed at whisper levels and didn't fall apart when the drummer wanted the kick drum to hurt.
The 813 wasn't sold as a nearfield or a reference box. It was a main monitor, the kind of speaker you built a control room around rather than sat on the meter bridge. UREI positioned it as the middle member of a three-model Time Aligned family. The company also set up "official listening posts" for it through regional distributors, which is a very 1970s way of saying you should hear this thing before you spec it into a room. Recording-Engineer (April 1979, p.125) ran the dealer list for the 813 under the headline "The first Time Aligned Control Room Speaker System," and the same listing reappeared in DB-Magazine (March 1979, p.9). UREI was pushing this model hard into professional channels rather than consumer retail.
The studio credits are where the 813 shows its worth. Granny's House Recording Studios in Reno ran a Live-End/Dead-End control room with a 48-input Solid State Logic SL6000E, Studer A800 MkIII and A80 analog 24-tracks, and a Studer A-820 for two-track. The main monitors were UREI Model 813 Time Aligns powered by Crown Delta-Omega amplification. The Enterprise in Burbank took a different route, using Model 813 enclosures as surround speakers in control rooms built around Quested Q412 mains. So the 813 could anchor a room, or it could fill the rear channels of one. Howard Schwartz Recording in New York listed Model 813s alongside Yamaha NS-10Ms in its Studio West, the classic big-monitor/small-monitor pairing of the era: the 813s for the truth, the NS-10Ms for the translation check.
That pairing shows up constantly in the trade-press studio listings. The 813 was the speaker you trusted for the full-range picture, with low end you could feel and midrange that didn't lie about the vocal. The NS-10M was the speaker you checked against because everybody's home stereo was worse. Engineers didn't choose between them. They used both, and the 813 did the heavy lifting.
UREI's Time Aligned family advertising ran repeatedly through Modern-Recording in 1980 (May 1980, p.65; July 1980, p.83; September 1980, p.59). It described the 813 as one of three sizes sharing the same crossover philosophy, the same Altec duplex drivers, and the same horn-loaded high-frequency approach. The pitch was to buy the 813 for the main room, and the smaller members of the family for rooms where you lacked the space or the budget. Whether that cross-sell worked is hard to say. The 813 itself clearly found its niche independent of the lineup, since it's the one that turns up in the studio credits decade after decade.
Collectors chasing a pair today should expect the usual realities of large-format vintage monitors. They are heavy, they are not shipping-friendly, and they were built to be installed rather than moved. The Altec 604 duplex driver at the heart of the design has its own following, so driver condition is the first thing to check. A recone or a replacement horn is not a casual expense. Cabinets that spent decades soffit-mounted in a working room will show it, and the crossover networks are old enough now that capacitor drift is a genuine concern. None of that is unique to the 813.
The 813 is not a casual listen. It was designed as a tool for people making decisions about recordings. UREI's advertising promised clean reproduction from low levels to the threshold of pain, and the studios that ran these in their main rooms clearly believed it.
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