AR 3 Speakers

For anyone who questions Violin's perspective in praising the old AR-3s, I can tell you that I've known him for many years and consider him to have some of the best ears I've encountered in this hobby.

What he didn't mention was that he has played the violin since studying it as a teenager and has the experience of playing in multiple orchestras, thus great exposure to the sounds of live, acoustic music.

Also, his AR-3s are not completely 55 years old! He had them gone through to ensure all drivers and crossover parts were performing as intended. He also replaced those troublesome level pots. My reason for mentioning this is you should not expect to pull out a pair that was in storage for the past 30 years, or some you just found at your local thrift store, and expect to experience the same level of performance as Violin enjoys.

But now perhaps the most telling part of the story. For years he has been frustrated that he couldn't convince his wife to sit down to enjoy music with him, regardless how refined of a system he'd assembled. Now with his AR-3s she is happy to have music on and listen all day long.

Hopefully he won't mind my telling "the rest of the story".

The AR3s just love power....the more the merrier.

The AR3a is only rated for 100 watts.

I have owned two pairs of 3a's,I ran them with a AR amplifier that I still have,it is rated at 60w per channel at 4 ohms.I can say from experience they will NOT handle that kind of power with 500w,they were never designed to handle that much.The problem was they sounded decent in the day and I always wanted to hear them louder,excellent bass but the tweeters are fragile.The AR amp was a perfect match for them,I found that with larger amps they were only slightly louder but were easily damaged.