was 100 Hz. When sound was developed for motion pictures, the basic RCA sound system was a single 8-inch (20.3 cm) speaker mounted in straight horn, an approach which was deemed unsatisfactory by Hollywood decisionmakers, who hired Western Electric engineers to develop a better speaker system. The early Western Electric experiments added a set of 18-inch drivers for the low end in a large, open-backed baffle (extending the range down to 50 Hz) and a high-frequency unit, but MGM was not pleased with the sound of the three-way system, as they had concerns about the delay between the different drivers. In 1933, the head of MGM's sound department, Douglas Shearer, worked with John Hilliard and James B. Lansing (who would later found Altec Lansing in 1941 and JBL in 1946) to develop a new speaker system that used a two-way enclosure with a W-shaped bass horn that could go as low as 40 Hz. The Shearing-Lansing 500-A ended up being used in "screening rooms, dubbing theaters, and early sound reinforcement". In the late 1930s, Lansing created a smaller two-way speaker with a woofer in a vented enclosure, which he called the Iconic system; it was used as a studio monitor and in high-end home hi-fi set-ups. During the 1940s swing era, to get deeper bass, "pipelike opening[s]" were cut into speaker enclosures, creating bass reflex enclosures, as it was found that even a fairly inexpensive speaker enclosure, once modified in this way, could "transmit the driving power of a heavy...drumbeat—and sometimes not much else—to a crowded dancefloor." Prior to the development of the first subwoofers, woofers were used to reproduce bass frequencies, usually with a crossover point set at 500 Hz and a loudspeaker in an infinite baffle or in professional sound applications, a "hybrid horn-loaded" bass reflex enclosure (such as the 15-inch Altec Lansing A-7 enclosure nicknamed the "Voice of the Theater", which was introduced in 1946). In the mid-1950s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected the "big, boxy" Altec A-7 as the industry standard for movie sound reproduction in theaters. 1960s: first subwoofers In September 1964, Raymon Dones, of El Cerrito, California, received the first patent for a subwoofer specifically designed to augment omnidirectionally the low frequency range of modern stereo systems (US patent 3150739). It was able to reproduce distortion-free low frequencies down to 15 cycles per second (15 Hz). A specific objective of