Written by Kent Learned, 20 July 2018, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
For the second Dinosaurs event we needed about 20 reasonable speakers, and we couldn’t afford what the vendors were selling. I had made four speaker cabinets with 2 x 20cm speakers in them for use on Beach Mission back in the mid 1980’s. We took that basic design and built an improved version, adding a treble speaker and Dino Mk I was born. It worked well enough and we built another 20 for about the cost of 6 or 7 similar commercial speakers. These affectionately became known as “Dino’s”.
The Dino MkII’s came from rebuilding the Dino MkI’s with the 3 wire, 30w / 24vdc amp module with a passive crossover in it. The Dino MkII was used around the park for a number of low powered self-contained applications. In the end, six of them were mounted in the ceiling of the woolshed, for the sheep shearing / sheep dog / horse shows. Others ended up up near the shop in Gold Rush, mounted up on the roof or beneath the water tower. Four of them ended up in the Clock Tower at the entrance to the park.
Years later when management no longer wanted some of them, I took some home, rebuilt them, and used them in low power applications. They need rebuilding again these days, but I have no current use for them, and they’re just sitting around in the shed not rebuilt.
The Dino MkIII was an evolution of the MkII. It had the new 4 wire amp/crossover module in it and the high frequency horn in the speaker was upgraded. They actually sounded quite nice. I wish I had some of them now.
In his first part of the space probe series, Spod has named the tunnel speakers “Mini Dino’s”. Cute, and sorta apt. They were made in pairs, the first one had the “Balanced” 24 volt amp module in it, and the second one was a slave, receiving its signal from the first box. We made six pairs of them.