Altec Lansing A7's 50's model

Here's a link to the system's PDF manual: (http://www.altecpro.com/pdfs/vintage/SpeakerAndMics/systems/A7-8G%20VOTT%20Speaker%20System%20Manual.pdf) and these guys do the authorized repairs: (www.greatplainsaudio.com)

Picked up a pair of Altec Valencia Bs about ten years ago,still have them. Same driver compliment,only 8 ohms. This started a fire in me and I am always scouring the used/consignment pro audio stores for bargains. The best one here in town does not recognize these for home use.I have since picked up a pair of Altec 902 drivers,Mantaray horns,JBL 2205 woofers and Apt supertweeters that I used to build speakers in a used pair of Altec Santana cabinets I bought on Craigslist.All told I have about $600.invested,I have seen the horn drivers alone sell for that.The biggest improvement came from biamping these.The had a used TDM crossover that had been sitting around for a long time,probably because it had rca jacks.Things like this are worth almost nothing to a pro audio store,so they are great places to look.Horns get a bad rap because they are very revealing of amplification,you should consider using tubes if you get these. Even the mighty Klipschorn will sound god awful with a cheap japanese receiver! I use single ended triodes on the horns and solid state on the bass. This may be a little more complicated than what you would care to go through,but you can have a lot of fun and the results are worth it.I assume because you are willing to put up with their size you are a bit of a putterer like me. I thank companies like Avant Garde and the Edgarhorn for the resurgence of interest in horns,even though they don't use compression drivers.They look cool! Certainly not as intimate and seamless as my Merlin VSM Ms were,but a whole lot more like live music!

As a supplement to my previous post, I might mention that I "graduated" from the A7 to a pair of AR3a speakers in the early 60s, i.e. from monaural to stereo. In our psychoacoustics lab, A7s were driven by the lab standard Mac MC 60 amp, but the efficiency of the A7 suggests that was overkill. I much preferred the big 511B horn with its 500 Hz crossover to the 811B.

Although the 511B and 811B are sectorial horns themselves, the A7 isn't a LF horn design in the sense of the large corner horns in vogue in the time of monaural, e.g. those from Paul Klipsch, JBL, Electrovoice. These were mostly rear loaded LF horns designed to be placed in a corner where the walls could act as extensions of the horn. Their popularity went out with stereo, because you could rarely find a configuration of corners that would work for stereo, and taking the speakers out of the corner removed a major design parameter. IIRC, the smoothness and frequency extension of the dome tweeter of the ARs contributed to the demise of the HF horns.

I looked in the Audiogon Blue Book and didn't see anything about the early A7s, so I'd guess following the ads is the way to figure out what's a fair price.

My impression of the sound of the A7s, with over a 40 year gap, compared to my KEF Reference 104/2s, is that the A7s lack refinement. But then that was not the design goal of the A7s, spreading a lot of sound over a large area with high speech intelligibility was. Usually, A7s were hung close to the ceilings in theaters and auditoriums.

db

Dear all,
Thank you very much for your inputs. I am going to pick up a pair and let you know how they work with my class A 2A3 push pull and single ended 300B. My room is 36X40X9. The biggest issue is to pick them up in Indiana and i live in MN. The owner just dont want to deal with the packing and shipping. I got a quote from a professional mover for $700.00 and the A7's is about $1000. The total is about $1700.00.

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