Altec Lansing A7's 50's model

Ginas,

You should find them a very easy speaker to drive. You haven't mentioned whether the A7s have the 811B or 511B sectorial horn. In looking over an Altec brochure from that time, I see the A7 spec is for the 811, although we had both in the lab. I hope you are aware the A7 is an industrial looking box intended to be custom finished for residential use. Their top of the line residential unit at the time was the Laguna, with two 803B LF drivers and a 511B horn with 802D HF driver. List price was $599; list price of the A7 was $299.40. By the way, one of the features mentioned in the brochure is ease of driving the speakers without the need for high powered amps.

I also have an interesting booklet by Badmaieff, Altec's chief acoustics and transducer engineer, in which he discusses speaker enclosure design principles. In my high school days, I built a few enclosures based on Altec designs and populated them with Altec drivers.

db

I own a pair of A-7's since last fall and love them. I have run them with 3/4 of a watt and 75 watts. Depending on your room size and listening habits I recommend caution in terms of power, especially if they are 16 0hm like mine. 75 watts was a pair of Blue Circle BC2 hybrid monoblocks, 3/4 of a watt ( That's right not even a full watt! )was a custom Darling amp and lastly a custom 45 SET both made by P. Townsend a retired electronics engineer/designer/extraordinaire.

These need clean low hum/noise amps. More than 2.5
milivolts from 12 feet away and you will hear it when music stops or possible quiet passages.

1. The sonic signature of the A7's? Dynamics and texture matched by few. (Tannoy?)
2. How much they worth? 700-3,500 Japanese worship A-7's
3. Can they still be serviced? Great Plains Audio http://www.greatplainsaudio.com/
4. How are they compare with modern speakers if this is a fair question?
Depends on how much care you show in amp choice and minor simple tweeks to cabinets and (damping)horn. Will exceed most modern designs in dynamics, texture, finesse and natural reproduction elegance.

My uncle owns a pair that he built in the 60's, I believe, and they are still some of the best speakers I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. His was the first truly high-end system I ever experienced. Go for it!

Hey, Ginas, I'd take the comments of Spl and Learsfool with a grain of salt. Finesse and texture are not terms that come to mind as I recall the A7. One only has to consider their design aim and common application: Auditorium sound. You might like them, but honky comes to mind. Of course, I've mostly heard them with Mac MC 60 amps -- we balanced the tubes on those very closely; as a grad student that was one of my jobs.

db

Dbphd, if by finesse you mean a more "laid-back" presentation (such as say the Sonus Faber line, for example), then no, the horns are not going to give you that. However, they are much more revealing of the various textures in the music than any other type I have ever heard. And they were not designed only for auditorium use, many people have used them in their homes for decades. Too much amplification would indeed ruin them, they are designed for low amplification, but matched with the right amps, they can be wonderful. All of those great orchestral recordings made on the Mercury label were famously mastered using those very A7's driven with MacIntosh amplification, for instance, similar to what you describe in your post. There is surely a reason they used that combo for such richly textured music! Yes, this is old school thinking, but I have yet to hear a high amplification/low sensitivity speaker combo come remotely close to matching the stunning realism of a great horn speaker/low powered tube amp combo.