Olson cutting head info

[basplin]

There's not much info about these heads online, and what little there is comes in bits on this forum. Does anyone know the history behind these? Who made them, years produced, etc.? It seems like Fairchild used (copied? bought? stole??) the design for some of their mono heads at one point, which adds to my intrigue.

[basplin]

boop.

[grooveguy]

My go-to mono head is the Olson from Fairchild. I obtained on on a Fairchild 539G recorder and rewound its 500-ohm coil to match low-Z, solid-state amplifiers. The Olson replaced a venerable Presto 1D, and I've never looked back. I'm particularly impressed with the amount of high-energy, high-frequency material I get on cuts since I switched. The Presto did a good job of the "air" in music, but it took the Olson to really get those pop-vocal sibilants, snares, etc. into the groove. I do know that the head was a 'shared' design, whether by hook or by crook, but was made legitimately by Fairchild and also by Lipps Co. in L.A. during the early '50s. One might think that the 'Olson' in the name might refer to Harry Olson, RCA's top microphone and speaker engineer in the infancy of High Fidelity, but I have not been able to verify this. I have never found a write-up on this head or a description in any of the anthologies.

[basplin]

Hey grooveguy,
This is great information - thanks so much for sharing. Very interesting about the joint production with Fairchild and Lipps, and makes sense why we see these heads with different "looks". Mine is the typical Olson black, but without the 'OLSON' lettering on the front. I love yours with the red wrinkle paint! I had always assumed that the Olson referred to Harry Olson of RCA, but Len Horowitz seemed to think that this was not the case, as anything Harry was involved with designing would have been branded 'RCA'... a good point. Still, odd that not much has been written about it.

I searched this forum for other references of 'Lipps' and came across a quite old post by you... not sure how I missed this before. You wrote that Olson heads are mentioned in Bob Morrison's book, "Disk Recording 1930-1960"... does it have any more information? I'll try to keep an eye out for Lipps literature, perhaps this was mentioned/displayed in a product brochure.

I have to agree with you about the sound of these heads. Mine also replaced a Presto 1C - and a good sounding one - and I noticed that the Olson has so much more high frequency information. The sound is just so crisp and clear in comparison. Mine is still wound with (I assume) the original 500 ohm coil, so I just used a beefy line transformer to run this from my 8 ohm amp tap. Did you do the rewinding yourself?

[tragwag]

I really dig my Olson head too!
My guess is they were made by this Olson audio brand:

[grooveguy]

Ah, you probably weren't born yet when THAT Olson was doing a rip-roaring mail order business. They put out a newspaper-type flyer every couple of months in the '50s and early '60s, with lots of electronics bargains... speakers, microphones, components... and even their own private-branded items like that mic mixer. But the Olson cutterhead predated that firm, and the bargain-basement Olson never manufactured anything of their own; most of their branded products were from Japan. I'm fairly certain that Fairchild engineered the Olson head, and maybe there was even an Olson on their staff that it was named after.

At some point I was given a Fairchild "Miller" cutterhead, a mid-'50s design and a step up from the Olson. Mine was missing parts, but I kept it... it's still around here somewhere. At an AES convention in L.A., sometime in the '70s, I spoke with George Alexandrovich, a head honcho at Fairchild (they had a booth at the show), asking him about the Miller head. I didn't think to bring up the Olson one, since it was working well for me. All those people are gone now, so we'll have to depend on some other old timer who may know the Olson derivation.

[tragwag]

Ah, you probably weren't born yet when THAT Olson was doing a rip-roaring mail order business. They put out a newspaper-type flyer every couple of months in the '50s and early '60s, with lots of electronics bargains... speakers, microphones, components... and even their own private-branded items like that mic mixer. But the Olson cutterhead predated that firm, and the bargain-basement Olson never manufactured anything of their own; most of their branded products were from Japan. I'm fairly certain that Fairchild engineered the Olson head, and maybe there was even an Olson on their staff that it was named after.

At some point I was given a Fairchild "Miller" cutterhead, a mid-'50s design and a step up from the Olson. Mine was missing parts, but I kept it... it's still around here somewhere. At an AES convention in L.A., sometime in the '70s, I spoke with George Alexandrovich, a head honcho at Fairchild (they had a booth at the show), asking him about the Miller head. I didn't think to bring up the Olson one, since it was working well for me. All those people are gone now, so we'll have to depend on some other old timer who may know the Olson derivation.

oh cool! thanks for sharing that - I love hearing this stuff!