Barnsley, U.K. (May 28, 2025)—Garnering applause as if it was a movie star—and it was—the original WEM P.A. system used throughout the 1971 Pink Floyd concert film, Live at Pompeii, was on-hand for a recent special screening. The P.A. wasn’t there just to be gawked at, however—it was pressed into service for the screening, too, allowing everyone in attendance to hear the performance just as the band itself heard it more than half a century earlier.
Live at Pompeii was recently digitally re-mastered in 4K with a new Steven Wilson Dolby Atmos audio mix, and the special screening at the Parkway Cinema in Barnsley, U.K. provided an opportunity for Chris Hewitt of CH Vintage Audio to bring out the classic sound system. An author and audio historian, Hewitt has meticulously located, restored and rebuilt all the parts constituting the system that Pink Floyd used in the ancient Roman Amphitheater. The WEM P.A. system, groundbreaking for its time, features period-authentic Celestion G12, G10, and MH1000 drivers.
“I started off by buying six WEM Audio Masters that belonged to Pink Floyd,” Hewitt said. As people learned he was collecting Pink Floyd gear, offers started coming in, and he was eventually able to rebuild the complex WEM system, which includes 10 SL100 secondary amps, WEM 4×12 and 2×12 P.A. columns loaded with Celestion and Goodman 12-inch speakers, and a WEM Festival stack.
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The Festival stack features Celestion 15-inch bass units, Celestion 12-inch lower mids, and Celestion 10-inch cone speaker upper mid horns. Additional cabinets have Celestion MH1000 horns and Vitavox 15 cell, multicell horns. The Celestion 12-inch and 10-inch cone speakers used were new G12 and G10 designs at the time, built with different cones and suspensions than their guitar amp counterparts, alongside the MH1000 midrange compression driver developed by Les Ward.
Restoring the 50-plus year-old system required significant effort. “With the Pompeii P.A., it’s all the actual speakers,” Hewitt said. Some of the vintage Celestion G10s and G12s were blown, and Hewitt was able to re-cone them using drivers from his extensive, period-specific collection.
“[What] I think that gave the Live at Pompeii P.A. and WEM speakers in general their characteristic sound, is the fact that they used English-made drivers,” he suggested. Hewitt’s theory is that speakers made in England sound different due to the damp manufacturing environment. “Celestion drivers in this P.A. were made in East Anglia, Ipswich,” he mused. This contrasts with American speakers of the era made in places like “sunny California,” resulting in a “damp cone when you manufacture the speaker,” that Hewitt felt “imparts tonal characteristics you can hear…a totally different sound.”
The screening sold out the 200-seat cinema—a crowd that included three Pink Floyd fans who drove from the south of France just to hear the system. Hewitt noted afterwards, “Never in my life have I heard a P.A. get a standing ovation.”
