genek

Bizarre as it may seem, veneering a pine AR will actually reduce its value.

If you've only been using household bleach, you might want to look at a two-step wood bleach. This stuff will not only bleach out stains, it will actually pull the natural color out of the wood and render it nearly bone white if you leave it on long enough. If all else fails, you use that and then replace the original color with something like "New Pine" gel stain.

It might seem counterintuitive, but in this case your best bet might actually be to stain the wood again. You can make a light wash of a blonde-ish gel stain that should fill in the dark cracks and also lighten the darker grain areas (which, btw, are that dark because they have also absorbed some of the darker stain). It'll also help even out that "dirty" look. https://generalfinishes.com/wood-finishes-retail/oil-based-wood-stains-sealers/gel-stains (click on "Colors") I would start with a test dab of "New Pine" on the proverbial inconspicuous location and see how that works. If you don't mind it a touch darker, "Prairie Wheat" will give you a color similar to the patina that develops naturally on pine over time. You will want to apply a light coat of stain sealer before staining, and then a clear matte topcoat to protect. All to simulate what it would have looked like if it had been left alone in the first place. Here's an example of what plain old pine looks like if you leave it alone for a long, long time except for an occasional waxing:

Limited. The Improved wasn't wired for biamping and had a high/low switch instead of level controls.

Even cleaned pots can have contact drop-outs. Try rotating them back and forth a few times to see if that changes anything. Also, be sure the jumper between the 2 and T terminals has not come loose. If that doesn't change anything, you may have lost a tweeter.

Original AR vs Teledyne AR is a fuzzy boundary, because the transfer from Villchur to Teledyne in 1967 retained Villchur's key people for five years. And from interviews with Roy Allison, Teledyne seems to have kept hands off product development during those five years as they concentrated on upsetting the applecart on the financial side of the house. So products released between 1967 and 1972 are probably still mostly "original AR," even if their labels have "Teledyne" on them.

MGC-1. You need a pair of these. Two pairs for home theater. Then you can use the AR-5s for center channel, one above the screen and the other below it so the sound images from the center of the screen.

It would be interesting make some interchangeable grills with these different thread count fabrics and then do some FR measurement to see how much of a difference there actually is between them.

Probably need to clarify this. Were you looking for someone to do this for you?

This the Wichelt Lambswool that was the recommended material for a number of years. It has been discontinued, and anyone who still has it is burning through NOS.

Don't mess with the headshell. There is nothing you can do with that version that won't destroy it.

It's medium weight natural. See the Feb 6 post above.

Entertainment of all types now have to compete with each other for users' attention. It's not unusual for people to "listen to music" on whatever player they have at the same time they're working, doing homework or hobbies, texting, emailing, browsing the web, etc. My guess is that it's pretty rare for people under the age of 30-35 to just clear the decks, sit back, close their eyes and devote themselves solely to the music. It also doesn't help that people who have actually heard a live, unamplified musical performance are becoming an ever shrinking percentage of the population.

It's probably unrealistic to expect very many people to become enthusiasts about products designed and manufactured before they were even born. I know that I do not have an Edison cylinder player or a giant console-sized vacuum tube AM radio around here.

The light in the photo is coming from a window opposite from me as I'm holding the swatch. The darker portion is in shadow, the lighter is in the sunlight.

The 901s were more dependent on room conditions that just about any other speaker I ever listened to. They sounded great in a dealer's demo room, but home was another matter. Here's one of Bose's ads: In the nearly 70 years I've been on this planet, I have never once lived in a place with a symmetrical space like this one. They've all been asymmetrical, usually with one of the side walls open to another room. You can probably easily imagine what happens to the sound from a direct/reflected speaker that has no wall on one side for its sound to reflect from. I don't think it was just coincidence that Bose's AM-5 speakers weren't designed to bounce sound off the rear or side walls.

The real question in my mind is not whether modern design is "better" than vintage, because in almost all cases the modern product will be better constructed and more durable than vintage, if only because of improvements in materials and manufacturing processes. But the biggest difference between modern and vintage is, IMO, the user listening preferences that product is designed to satisfy. And most of today's audio consumers are looking for something very different than what what was popular 40 or 50 years ago. If the designers of today's KLH set as their target a speaker that would sound like a direct descendant of Henry Kloss' original designs, the result will likely be a speaker most fans of the originals will think sound as good as or better than any vintage model they could find and restore. But they could just as easily build a large 3-way with a sizable acoustic suspension woofer, target the response at Floyd Toole's 1990s' listener preference survey results and produce an end product that most AR/KLH/Allison speaker fans will think sounds like a screeching magpie.

One of these (or rather, a pair of one of these) would probably be my choice: https://www.nhthifi.com/products/cs-12-subwoofer-single https://www.nhthifi.com/products/cs-10-subwoofer-single

The cans are almost certain to be filled with some variety of PCB. PCBs weren't banned until 1979. BTW, solids and coatings that appear to be wax may also be PCBs.

If we could see a cross-section of the cap, it would probably be stacks that are folded over to fit into the box. We'd probably have to peel layers off to see whether they're separate sheets of foil and paper or paper with foil on one face. But from the small dents I see at the folds, I'm leaning toward paper with foil.

I haven't ever cut one open, but the wax block caps were most likely stacked paper capacitors, layers of foil separated by waxed or oil impregnated paper, or layers of paper waxed on one face with foil bonded to the other.

With no cross braces or tensioning rods they've never looked very sturdy to me. I remember a lot of furniture from the 50s and 60s with similar construction and they all wobbled a lot.

It's MDF. HDF is the stuff they make perforated pegboard out of.

Many thanks to member Dave S. for providing this bit of AR/Teledyne history. Teledyne 1980 Q2.pdf

There really aren't any "rules" for selling something here on CSP. Describe the items as best you can, tell people where you are and set a price. For a reasonable amount, there will probably be someone willing to come get them who will actually want to restore them and won't just replace drivers with boom box woofers and cheap tweeters to flip them on Craigslist or eBay.