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One of Clive Sinclair’s more successful forays into the home
entertainment market was Project 60. It launched in 1969 and comprised a set of
ready-made audio modules. Over the following year or so more were added and
eventually the system included three 
Whatever else has been said or written about the Q16, there is no
getting away from the fact that they were, and still are quite striking. If
you know anything of sixties audio then you can imagine how they stood out
against the mostly dull and dreary competition that had changed little over the
years. The elegantly simple square shape, solid teak surround and
oddly shaped backside had an almost futuristic -- for the 1960s -- appearance. Sinclair’s famously
over the top advertising blurb only added to the impression. Phrases like
‘sealed and contoured pressure chamber’, and ‘specially designed driver system’ promised a bold new
era of audio excellence.
The actuality was a little more mundane. Inside the enclosure
there’s a single, and pretty much bog-standard, elliptical speaker nailed
(really…) to a slab of chipboard. It’s identical to the sort of speakers used
in countless radios and television sets of the time. The ‘pressure chamber’
reference concerns the Q16’s sealed rear cover. It’s moulded from what looks
like a resin-bonded paper or fabric and has no openings. It’s a well
established speaker design technique and the key advantage is that because
sound pressure waves can’t escape from the back of the speaker they act on the
moving diaphragm like a sort of acoustic spring, resulting in a cleaner, crisper sound.
The downside is it is less efficient because no sound comes from behind the
speaker, via openings or ‘ports’ in the front or rear of the enclosure. To
overcome this the speaker has to be driven harder to produce the same kind of
sound levels as an un-ported speaker. Fake screw-like mouldings on the rear
cover add to the illusion of compexity implying there’s more going on inside the box than
there is. As you can see from the photos it is all quite basic, and the less
said about the ‘special cellular foam front, chosen for its ability to pass
audio frequencies’, the better. (It had a tendency to crumble into dust)..
Fitting acoustically transparent speaker material to the front of the enclosure, without it looking really tacky or doing damage, proved to be a challenge. In the end I decided to mount the material on a lightweight frame made out of thin rigid plastic. The material was then stretched over the frame and glued to the edges. It fits snugly and invisibly inside the teak surround and a future restorer would have no trouble removing it and should they desire, return it to its
original state. The rear support foot on one of the speakers had come adrift at
some point. It’s supposed to be held in place by a screw attaching to a threaded
clip inside the rear cover. The clip had fallen off, making it next to
impossible to get it back into place. A previous owner had re-attached the foot
with a couple of small angle brackets and although they couldn’t be seen in
normal use. It just didn’t look right so the only thing to do was remove the
rear cover and retrieve the clip.
This also turned out to be easier said than done. It was tightly
bonded to the chipboard baffle board by thick glue that wasn’t about to give up
without a struggle. Cutting into the cover simply wasn’t an option so I tried a
variety of techniques to prise it off. The only one that showed any promise was
softening the glue with a solvent, sparingly applied with a cotton bud, then
slowly excavating the now sludgy residue with a thin 1mm drill fitted to my
Dremel rotary tool. It took nearly two hours eventually it came away, with no damage
to the cover or baffle. The screw clip was bonded to the inside of the cover,
so it shouldn’t get away again. I resisted the temptation to permanently glue
the cover back in place so I could carry out a side-by side comparison with the
other, still securely sealed Q16, to see how effective the pressure chamber business was. Younger and more discriminating ears than mine
might be able to detect differences but even in a blind test, to me they
sounded exactly the same. With all due allowances made for age, advances in Hi-Fi equipment and so on, bass is still in short supply but otherwise they produce a
quite mellow sound that’s not too far off what you might expect from a pair of
top-end budget speakers.