decree in 1937 by a group of ERPI executives, including George Carrington Sr., Leon Whitney "Mike" Conrow, Bert Sanford Jr., and Alvis A. Ward, with funding from three Wall Street investors. They reincorporated as "Altec Service Company", the "Altec" standing for "all technical". Company executives promised they would never make or sell audio equipment. The Altec Services Company purchased the bankrupt Lansing Manufacturing Company and melded the two names, forming the Altec Lansing Corporation on May 1, 1941. The first Altec Lansing power amplifier, Model 142B, was produced that same year. James Bullough Lansing worked for Altec Lansing, then in 1946 he left to found the James B. Lansing Company (JBL), another manufacturer of high-quality professional loudspeakers, which competed with Altec Lansing. Altec Lansing produced a line of professional and high-fidelity audio equipment, starting with a line of horn-based loudspeaker systems. First developed for use in motion-picture theaters, these products were touted for their fidelity, efficiency and high sound-level capability. Products included "biflex" speakers (where frequency range was increased by a flexible "decoupling" of a small center area of the speaker's cone from a larger "woofer" area) and the 604-series of coaxial speakers (which employed a high-efficiency compression driver mounted to the rear of the 604's low-frequency magnet, and exited through a multicellular horn that passed through center of the woofer's cone). Altec Lansing also made the Voice of the Theatre systems. The design resulted from a collaboration between John Hilliard and Jim Lansing. Douglas Shearer didn't hesitate to approve the Hilliard's proposal and authorized "any reasonable budget". Hilliard became the team leader of this new project. Hilliard immediately recruited Lansing Manufacturing, Robert Stephens, a design draftsman on MGM's staff, and Harry Kimball. The speaker was named the Shearer horn. Later on, a more refined model, the VOTT, was introduced. The smallest model, the A-7, used a medium-sized sectoral metal horn for high frequencies, which featured dividers (sectors) to provide control sound dispersion, plus a medium-sized wooden low-frequency enclosure, which functioned as a hybrid bass-horn/bass-reflex enclosure. The most often used Voice of the Theatre system was the A-4, many of which are still in use in motion picture theaters . The efficiency of all of these products originally provided high sound pressure levels from the limited amplifier power available at the time. The original Voice of the Theatre series included the A-1, A-2, A-4, and the A-5. The A-7 and