Western Electric WE-594A
A compression driver that spent decades as a movie-theater component and then became one of the most-wanted treble units in the collector world.
Overview
The WE-594A is a Western Electric compression driver - a "loudspeaking telephone" unit, in the company's own vocabulary. Collectors today treat it as a piece of high-frequency treasure. The most concrete technical detail in period documentation comes from a 1953 Audio article on coupled loudspeakers. It used a WE-594A mated to a 31A horn as the treble section of a four-driver array, crossed over at 800 cps. That is high for a modern tweeter, but for a large-format theater driver of this vintage it's a sensible handoff. The author specifically praised how smoothly the treble and woofer patterns joined in the azimuth plane at crossover - no abrupt discontinuity in the distribution pattern, no phase trouble from folded-horn bends to fight.
That same article says a lot about the driver's place in a system. The author ran four Western Electric 728B drivers in his wedges and brought in the 594A on a 31A horn for the top end. He noted that with 12-inch drivers like the 728B or 754A, a listener could get an excellent loudspeaker without any high-frequency unit at all. The 594A was the upgrade, not the baseline - the thing you added when you wanted the top octaves handled properly. Audio (May 1953, p.64) describes the arrangement in detail, and the crossover figure of 800 cps is the single most useful spec anyone has preserved for this driver.
By the late 1970s the 594A had moved from theater installs into the want-ads. The Audio classifieds of early 1979 carry repeated "WANTED" notices for the WE 594A and 555 drivers, alongside requests for 22A and large multicellular horns, 10A cartridges, and 954A products. The collector market for Western Electric theater gear was already active and hungry by the end of that decade. One recurring advertiser out of a Hollywood P.O. box was buying 594A or 555 drivers "and other WE speakers, amps, horns" month after month. That kind of repetition only happens when supply is thin and demand is steady.
Physically, the 594A is a compression unit - the kind of thing that bolts to a horn rather than radiating on its own. The 1953 article's reference to "the WE 594A loudspeaking telephone with 31A horn" makes the pairing explicit. The driver is useless without a horn, and the 31A is the one Western Electric documentation ties to it. Collectors chasing a 594A are usually chasing it to complete exactly that kind of horn-loaded high-frequency section. The 31A appears in the archive as its own entry, which reflects how often the two are discussed together.
Hard specifications for the 594A are remarkably scarce. No sensitivity figure, no impedance, no published frequency-response curve, no power rating survives in the material available here. All that remains is the 800 cps crossover from the 1953 article and the driver's identity as a horn-mounted high-frequency unit. Buyers today are working from reputation and from the handful of period write-ups like the Audio piece, not from a data sheet.
Condition and completeness matter a lot with a driver like this. A 594A without its horn is a paperweight with a diaphragm inside. A 594A with a correct 31A horn is a working high-frequency section. The want-ads of 1979 were already competing for these units, and the decades since have not made them more common. Anyone considering one should evaluate the diaphragm and the horn mating carefully, and should treat the 800 cps crossover figure as the one reliable anchor point for system design. Everything else about the driver's behavior will have to be measured, not looked up.
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