Drivers Odeon



Newhouse News Service

GRAND BAY, Ala. - The nearby train's whistle and wheels cut through the delicate veil of Willie Odom's sleep, and he sees again the fog outside his tugboat's wheelhouse and the little line on his radar screen. Lying in bed, he can feel the bump.

He sees the bridge and the fire. He sees the bodies in the water.

He stays asleep if he's taken his pill, but his screams wake his daughter and his grandchildren.

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'It's going on five years, and it's hard to shake loose,' Odom said. 'Every year it rolls around; it's all over the world and everything.'

Hours before dawn on Sept. 22, 1993, Odom, blinded by thick fog, steered the tugboat Mauvilla into the Bayou Canot northeast of Mobile and struck a railroad-bridge piling. The impact bent the tracks more than 3 feet. Five minutes later, just before 3 a.m., Amtrak's Sunset Limited, carrying 210 sleeping passengers, slammed into the damaged rails. The lead engine sailed off the bridge and 150 feet over the bayou to bury its nose 40 feet in the underwater mud. Other cars caught fire or sank.

Forty-seven people died, the worst wreck in Amtrak history.

It took a couple of days for the news media to link the derailment to the Mauvilla. It took Odom only a split second.

He doesn't talk about that night. For five years he has avoided reporters. His first interview took place in his living room Sept. 3 and lasted about half an hour.

'I wish I never had that accident,' he said in the living room of his scuffed, brick home on a Grand Bay dirt road. 'I had a good job, good money to raise my family. I used to tell my mother, `I should take me a gun and end all my troubles.' '

A blaze of fire

Odom took the helm of the Mauvilla at 11:30 p.m. Sept. 21, 1993, after Capt. Andrew Stabler went to bed. At age 45, he'd had his piloting license for three years, still a 'cub.' The Mauvilla headed north, bound for Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.

The fog grew thicker as he made his way up the Bayou Sara. Soon Odom was driving blind in what pilots call a 'shutout fog.' He decided to tie up at one of the banks.

'I couldn't see with my lights,' he testified in his only public statement in the past five years, a December 1993 hearing before members of the National Transportation Safety Board in Mobile.

His deckhand tried twice to throw a line around trees on the banks, but missed. Odom saw what he thought was another boat on the radar, and slowed.

'I couldn't see nothing, and then I kept looking. Then, after awhile, I felt a bump,' he testified. He thought one of the six barges he was pushing had broken loose and scraped the tugboat.

The bump woke Stabler, who joined Odom on the deck as the small crew inspected their tow.

'All of a sudden I heard this `pshoo' noise go by and just a blaze of fire,' Odom testified. 'And then we, when we got up closer, we could see the bridge. That's the first time I seen the bridge.

'And then I say, I said, `Oh, my Lord, I done made the wrong turn.' '

No criminal charges were brought against the crew of the Mauvilla. No one on board tested positive for drugs or alcohol. Odom was named as a defendant in lawsuits brought by widows and widowers and other relatives of the dead, and by injured passengers, against Amtrak, CSX Transportation and the tugboat company, Warrior & Gulf Navigation. The lawsuits piled up in U.S. District Court in Mobile; a single, massive trial has been set for February 1999.

`He don't ever talk about it'

He's lost a lot of weight, down from 250 pounds in 1993 to 187 pounds now. He has a stomach ulcer. He sees a psychologist on occasion. He takes the antidepressant drug Paxil every day. The blinds in his the windows are crooked and broken. The telephone is out. His daughter's children play basketball in the yard.

Some days he stays in bed, his son-in-law said. He is 50 years old and carries himself like an old man.

His daughter, Williene Hill, 32, lived away from Mobile at the time of the accident but returned a couple of months later. 'He wasn't nothing like my daddy when I left,' she said.

Odom raised eight children alone after his first wife left and moved to Buffalo, N.Y., in the mid-1970s, their daughter said. Odom's mother, now 68 and an invalid, helped him. They lived in Foley until Hurricane Frederic destroyed their house in 1979. He took a job as a deckhand with Warrior & Gulf in 1980 and moved to Grand Bay.

'He's used to making that good money on that boat,' Hill said. She and her family moved in with Odom recently to help pay the bills. He hasn't worked since the accident.

Odom sat elbows-on-knees on his couch in a dark living room and asked for a light for his menthol cigarette. 'This is something I used not to do,' he said. He shut the door to the kitchen because his mother hates smoke.

He avoided eye contact, constantly rubbing his beard and his droopy eyes, one of them puffy with an infection. He smoked down to the butt. His arms and legs are thin. His voice is deep and low.

'I live near a train. It bothers me. I can't seem to shake it. I stay worried and stressed out.'

He has nightmares, his daughter said. He still doesn't sleep well at night.

Survivors recall kindness

After the train caught fire, Odom and Stabler and the Mauvilla's crew steered toward the scene. They couldn't see well in the smoke. They were afraid that if they came too close, the boat's powerful engines would suck swimming passengers underwater.

A Mauvilla deckhand, in a skiff, picked up swimmers coated with train fuel and drove them to the tug. The Mauvilla rescued 17 people in the water.

One of the survivors, a lounge-car attendant, spoke to a crew member on the tugboat; he didn't know which one.

The survivor testified at the hearing: 'He told me, `I think I hit that bridge,' and he said, first he said, `I'm going to lose my job.' I said, `Why?' He said, `Because I hit that bridge.'

'I said, `It was an accident.' He said, `No,' he say, `I might even go to the penitentiary.' I said, `For a freak accident?' He said, `No,' he said, `Because the Coast Guard don't believe that.'

'And he said, `I saw the bridge, but I wasn't sure I hit it at first, but once I saw the train go in, I knew I had.' And he showed it to me on the radar screen, that he had seen the bridge back where he had saw it.'

Odom would say that he didn't recall that conversation but did remember a similar one with the deckhand, in which he described the moment that the cause of the accident 'dawned on me.'

Another survivor, passenger Trudy Justin of Panama City, Fla., recalled recently the kindness of the Mauvilla crew that night, especially Odom.

'A man from the burning car had burned his feet, and (Odom) was trying to find him slippers. That's one of the things I remember,' Justin said. She remembered seeing Odom at the hearing three months later. 'He looked scared,' she said.

She sends him a Christmas card every year.

Odom sat forward on his couch and thought about the question, what brings you happiness today?

'I go to church,' he said.

Odom doesn't make it every Sunday. Last week, he stayed in bed.

His family brings him comfort. 'When my kids come around, we talk. Some of them will cook out in the yard or something. I enjoy that, to get my mind off some of this stuff.'

He called Stabler after the accident. His old captain never called back, he said.

'I decked for him for 10 years. You think you got a friend, and all of a sudden they turn their back on you.'

Stabler, also a defendant in the lawsuits, could not be reached for comment.

Odom wants to work again. His daughter said he tried to get his pilot's license back. 'Once, it looked like they were going to give it back to him,' she said. He did not get it back.

'My psychologist told me I won't never be able to go back to it,' Odom said. 'You weren't there. You don't know. You didn't see the people like I did.'

As I conducted experiments almost over two decades with DIY open baffle loudspeakers, horn systems, transmission line solutions and all that stuff mostly in combination with full range drivers, time was come to search for a professional option. I always had the fun of the handicraft work in my focus and sometimes even created very interesting solutions which had its (sound) qualities in some special aspects. But I never created the Holy Grail of music reproduction which I always was hoping to get sometime...
Odeon Rigoletto 2020, veneer finish is called 'Mappa'

On the other hand I have had my ears very close in touch to the loudspeaker market all the time and I believe I know most of the systems which potentially could be (or could have been) a perfect match for single ended triodes. My triode amps were even liaised with a nice professional two way system consisting of a horn tweeter and a bass reflex woofer for a few years (I am not going to mention the manufacturer here as I do not want to blame the speaker; honestly speaking I really had fun with that system). But finally I got more and more the impression that the lower octaves were slowly hobbling behind the mid and high range.
Compression driver in spherical horn and 18 cm bass-midrange driver from GAP in a back-loaded horn
This is an effect I never experienced with any Odeon Audio model I have ever heard. If you ask me Odeon Audio from Germany (located in Haltern am See / North Rhine-Westphalia) is indeed one of the most serious and reliable loudspeaker manufacturers in the world. Founder and managing partner of Odeon Audio, Axel Gersdorff, is one of the most creative master minds of the scene with his more than 30 years of experience and he obviously has a heart for tube amp lovers.
'My' new Odeon Rigoletto 2020 cabinets at Odeon, still without the drivers
(© by Odeon)
Some of you still might know the two way horn loudspeaker Odeon Rigoletto which has been produced approximately from 2003 to 2016. This was a design following the 'pure doctrine' from the perspective of single ended triode maniacs. But I missed to grab this speaker in time when it was available. Unfortunately it has been discontinued as the follow up model Midas has been launched that time (around 2015/2016). Even coming along with a sensitivity of 95 dB, honestly speaking this follow up model with its two bass reflex drivers running in parallel and an impedance of 6 ohms is a very good choice for stable, stronger tube amps but never was a perfect match for single ended triodes up to let´s say 7 watts nominal power output (e.g. like a 300B is providing).
First rough positioning in my listening room
Slightly irresolutely how to proceed in terms of searching for a professional speaker system for my 2A3 triodes (a pre-owned Odeon Rigoletto speaker was no option for me), I spontaneously called Odeon in February 2020. Mr. Constantin Buchholz explained that they were close to finalization with the development of a new smaller speaker system being dedicated also for flea watt triodes. It was the new Odeon Rigoletto 2020 (but the name of the speaker still was not fixed that time)! Main technical boundaries he indicated: compression driver with Odeon´s famous spherical horn which is milled out of a block of birch plywood for the heights and an 18 cm bass-midrange driver from Galm Audio-Produkte (GAP, Armin Galm, Badenweiler, Germany) in a back-loaded horn for the lower frequencies. Odeon and GAP were developing the final design details of that chassis together over a period of about one and a half years in order to get the perfect system for their demands. Size, material, folding of the seam, Thiele/Small parameters etc. still had to match perfectly for a back-loaded horn solution.
Abq
Proud to own serial no. 01 (a and b for left and right); WBT nextgen terminals
Abbreviation 'Rigo II' indeed should be 'Rigoletto 2020'...

OdeonI will describe the technical specifications more detailed later, important to point out for now is: I simply pre-ordered this speaker even as neither the technical development was finished nor the final market price was fixed, simply trusting in Odeon´s skills, know-how and experience. It was a very promising blind buy to me but at no moment I did feel uncomfortable.
Both - ring radiator and paper cone chassis - are driven by a neodymium magnet
In early spring 2020 I was still hoping that I might pick up my speakers very soon at Odeon in Haltern am See. For me it´s just a three-hours-drive from the place where I live and I intended to bring along my new built Sun Audio Uchida 2A3H 'special edition' together with my Audio Note M2 Phono pre amp to Odeon to have a first session directly at the manufacturer. On the one hand to pay homage to my new babies and on the other hand to meet Axel and Constantin in order to share our thoughts and have a talk about freak scene and hifi spleens. But then COVID-19 appeared in Germany...
Well, finally we agreed on shipping the speakers by a shipping company and accordingly they arrived by end of May. Unpacking them was feeling like Christmas to me! As I missed to inform you about further technical details up to now, it´s time to catch up on everything:
Dimensions (height, depth, width): 110 cm x 40 cm x 22 cm
Impedance: 8 ohms
Cross over: @ 2,100 Hz (slew rates: 18 dB/octave tweeter; 12 dB/octave bass-midrange driver)

Drivers Don't Work

Drivers Odeon
Terminals: WBT nextgen

The positioning of the speakers is uncritical. They do not necessarily need the wall very close in their neck but they benefit from such a position. In my room the best position is a distance of 20-30 cm from the (back) wall. The advantage of the Rigoletto 2020 is that it has a bass horn which is firing downwards, using the floor as a virtual extension of the horn mouth. The substance of the bass foundation is simply unbelievable compared to the relatively small size of the speaker cabinets. Don´t get me wrong: the bass is very deep and the -3 dB point at 42 Hz seems more than reliable to me. But it is not booming - in fact it is very clear and free of any artefacts. There is no coloration except the one coming directly from the historical triodes... That really gives me the creeps!
I don´t wanna step too much into details now as next time my report about the Odeon Rigoletto 2020 will be published on hifistatement.net anyway. But I am getting more and more convinced that this speaker might be the last one I will ever own. I really like the relatively small size (keeping also their wife acceptance factor into account...) and from the technical point of view I believe that this speaker is almost perfect and technically on the edge in terms of the bass foundation which generally can be achieved with a 2A3 triode.
We do not need to talk about the mid range and high range sections as everything is perfect, too. It is so sweet sounding with a cross over between both driver systems which simply seems not to be existing - as if you are sitting in front of a full range driver. Of course no speaker is really perfect but the Odeon Rigoletto 2020 is the perfect partner for single ended triodes (of course even not being limited to!). I would even give it a try with a 45, RE604 or other similar special low power SET´s. The Rigoletto 2020 generally has a very neutral overall character and is free of any artefacts, allowing to enjoy and concentrate on the values, colorations and essence(s) of historical triodes.
For my recently new built Sun Audio Uchida 2A3H 'special edition' the 'Rigo 2020' simply is a perfect match and the calming effect is that I now can concentrate on collecting vinyl. Key word Uchida 2A3H 'special edition': this is stuff for a new story to come next time. If you now should have tasted blood, I strongly recommend to keep directly in touch with Axel Gersdorff or Constantin Buchholz of Odeon Audio. Please note that you currently (5th June 2020) won´t find any details about the Rigoletto 2020 on their website. I assume details will follow soon but of course you still can order this new speaker.
Contact details:
Odeon
Odeon Audio / Axel Gersdorff

Drivers Odeon Cinema

45721 Haltern am See
phone: +49 (0)2364 50 63 77

Drivers De Nvidia

https://www.odeon-audio.com

Stay tuned!
Edit (January 08, 2021): follow up for the test on hifistament.net or for the test in English language.