It is now almost 80 years since James B. Lansing formed a partnership with Ken Decker in Los Angeles to manufacture loudspeakers for those new-fangled radios that hobbyists and affluent Americans aspired to own.

Jim’s timing was perfect. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time to apply his innovative ideas to solve what turned out to be the motion picture industry’s most pressing problems.

In 1927, Warner Bros introduced talking pictures with "The Jazz Singer", starring Al Jolson. "Talkies" were an immediate success. Although the c Depression subsequently cast a long shadow over Hollywood (and the rest of the world), there was no stopping the demand for talking pictures or the cinemas in which they could be shown.

But there were problems associated with the "talkies", many of which initially proved to be quite intractable.

The most complex of those problems revolved around the absence of loudspeakers with sufficient power output and quality to suit large cinemas which frequently exceeded 1000 seats.

The Western Electric Company was one of the first firms to tackle this problem and they assigned a large team of engineers to the task. But Western Electric didn’t have the field to themselves and there were numerous private researchers working on the same problems. It was during this period that one of the most successful researchers was Jim Lansing. As a result, his speakers had a marked edge over virtually every other loudspeaker in the market place at that time.

Jim Lansing’s most significant achievement was the development of a milling procedure for producing flat voice coil wires. The flat wire could be wound into a much stronger, more durable ribbon voice coil that had the added advantage of significantly higher power-handling and a more effective use of the space available in the voice coil air-gap. Without that development, there was no simple way to resolve the fundamental design problems associated with producing an effective compression driver.