Classic speakers to hunt down used

Hi Gonglee3:

Will you be using these speakers in your gym system? If so, be careful that you get speakers rated at 8 ohms and not 4 ohms. The Marantz 2270 was a bit of an anomaly, in that it put out 70 wpc into 8 ohms, but only 46 wpc into 4 ohms. Very popular receiver though.

To read up on classic speakers, check out the Classic Speakers web site .

I know the most about and have owned a number of Acoustic Research speakers over the years. My favorite was the AR-5 a 3 way design with a 10 inch woofer. I use a modern era design (circa 1995) in the AR 302 in my main system. Other goodies were the AR3 & AR4 from the 60's & 70's and the AR 9 from the 80's.

Regards, Rich

I would add Klipsch - anything from the late 80's (Forte) and *earlier*.

The New Advents are a classic and still sound great. Make sure the foam surrounds of the woofers are intact, as they tend to rot after 10-15 years. I owned mine for 25 years, replaced the woofers once, and sold them here on Audiogon to a guy who continues to enjoy them. Smooth, good bass extension, and pretty eficient - I originally ran them with the Advent 300 receiver, which only made 15 W/ch. The beautiful real walnut veneer was just icing on the cake.

If you find a pair of older Large Advents that have had the original tweeters replaced with the orange fried-egg tweeters, they would be sonically equivalent to the New Advents. Again, check the woofer surrounds carefully for rot. There are plenty of places that will replace the surrounds for you, but you need to figure that into the price. Good luck!

David

The ORIGINAL AR 9 is legendary. I don't know much about it but Chadnliz and Quadophile might. I do remember that the lower priced EARLY VERSION AR 90 sounded quite nice to me so many years ago, and that the AR 9 was said to be even better.

A few large-box classics...

Altec model 14 and model 19 are very good-sounding older high efficiency systems.

IMF and Fried (same designer) built some very nice transmission line systems.

The Snell Acoustics Type A is one of the most intelligently designed speakers ever, and was very well executed. Potential weak point is the downward-facing woofer has probably sagged over time, but I would guess it could be reconed or replaced.