claudel

Amen. At this point, Gene, I'd like to think that it was the two flights of stairs along with the weight of the speakers that damped enthusiasm. As my guess is that a significant proportion of the membership is, like me, looking at youth in the rear-view mirror, such a consideration would hardly be surprising!

Thanks for your comment, EP3. I quite agree, of course. Thanks, too, to Pete, to whom I've already written privately.

My thanks to Aadams and ra.ra for their supportive comments. Thanks too to Gene for his courtesy and helpfulness with regard to the OP. Unfortunately, because of the lack of interest in the speakers and the need to get rid of them one way or another, the speakers are going to be dumped on this coming Tuesday, September 3.

This comment is largely meant to bump this posting higher up the queue in a last bid for attention. As there haven't been any takers for these speakers so far, come October 1 or so they will be carted off to Staples, BestBuy, or anyone else who will take them off our hands. I am a bit surprised—saddened, too—that there is so little interest in them. With refoamed woofer surrounds, I am sure that they would perform superbly for another twenty years or more.

No, not yet. Interested? Either way, thanks for asking.

A friend of mine who lives in a Manhattan walkup apartment (in the East Seventies near York Avenue) wishes to dispose of the AR 58B speakers she has had since the mid-1980s. Cosmetically, the speakers look almost as good as new. Both grilles are in perfect condition. The vinyl veneer, however, has come slightly loose at two corners, and like all the vinyl-clad AR speakers of that era, all the surfaces have acquired an unpleasant stickiness. The only other minus is the one you'd expect to find on 35-year-old speakers: the woofer surrounds have decayed, one of them to the point where the sound is compromised. Rather than pay someone to have the woofers refoamed, my friend prefers to get rid of these big boxes and replace them with a pair of AR M1 speakers. Because my friend is in her seventies now, as am I, she is no longer able to comfortably lug a pair of 55-pound speakers down two flights of steps and thence heaven knows where. On her behalf, therefore, I am offering the speakers free of charge to someone who will accept the responsibility to pick them up and cart them away once and for all. I repeat, there is no charge, no fine print—but also no right of return on account of buyer's remorse or any other reason! I invite anyone interested in getting these speakers to send me a private message so that phone and address details can be exchanged and appropriate arrangements can be made. My friend and I would both be truly pleased to see these fine speakers go to someone who will make good use of them.

Dear Tom (if I may), I now regret that I stopped following this thread before I saw your wonderful comments of 19 months ago. Not only are they a pleasure to read, but they answer several long-lingering questions—and several others that dropped unnoticed by the wayside in half a century of living. What it says about folks like us who dwell on the technology of yesteryear I leave to more "practical" (often = romance-free) men to decide! With much gratitude, Tom McCarthy

Dear ar_pro, Thanks for replying; your comments really struck a chord. If tomes haven't been written about the problems that come with the interaction of a passion for audio and the female of our species, they bloody well ought to have been. Of course, the question of who would read them remains unanswered. I didn't have a car back in those days, which hardly seem more than a year or two ago. I got to that repair place via the subway; the one-way trip from the Bronx was 55 minutes, barring delays. The carrier I used to transport the amp (I still have it) consisted of a triple thickness of oversized heavyweight paper shopping bags, with masking tape reinforcing the top and securing the three handles on each side to one another. Fortunately I was well aware of the need to make the trip only on rain-free days! Last but not least, please note that photographic evidence has forced me to edit my earlier comments in an important detail. If this experience teaches me to insist less on the incomparable excellence of my memory, it will have done me a good turn.

Gentlemen: May I add a belated postscript to your discussion? I came to this thread because, like "ra ra" and others, I have been puzzled by the occasional eBay auctions I've seen for old AR amps with a headphone jack and related circuitry. The recollections and speculations of Robert_S and Mr. Tyson especially have lifted several veils, and I thank them sincerely for doing so. My own recollections, which both supplement and slightly conflict with Mr. Tyson's, are as follows. First, some autobiographical background. I turned 22 in 1967, when the AR amp was announced. In college I had become strongly enamored of the AR turntable and AR speakers and decided that I wanted to own them once I succeeded in mending my impecunious ways. All such thoughts were put on hold when I was drafted in July 1967, and it was several months later, while I was still in training, that I read of the introduction of the amp. As it happens, I was shipped off to Vietnam in December 1967 for the standard tour of duty of one year—i.e., if one lived so long. Virtually the only positive thing about my service there was that the associated combat pay provided me with enough money to buy a complete AR system: the turntable, the amp, and a pair of 4x speakers. I placed the order for the equipment in November 1968 and the AR sales staff, as helpful as one could ever desire, arranged for shipment to my parents' address in time for Christmas. The point of offering all this detail is to underline the significance of the purchase for me. As I no longer possess any of these pieces and have only one or two faded Kodak snaps of the amp, my recollections obviously have little concrete support. You may or may not take my word that I have an excellent memory, but given the autobiographical import of the circumstances, I think any reader would agree that the likelihood of my getting things right is enhanced. Now the facts are these. The AR amp I received in December 1968 was built in the first full year of production. The logo on the left did not include the "Inc.", and the heat-sink fins were exposed, not caged.*[but see addendum below.]* Of course, there was no headphone jack. I know that these descriptions seem to contradict the far more authoritative ones of Mr. Tyson, but no disrespect is meant. I am simply reporting what I experienced. Indeed, over the 21 years I possessed and used the amp, it underwent some half-dozen "repairs" at factory-authorized facilities in New York City (the sneer quotes are there because several repairs were clearly bungled). During the many hours I spent at these shops, I saw a dozen or more AR amps sitting on visible shelves. All of them lacked the "Inc." on the front, and of those whose back I could see, none had a cage. I gave the amp away—to a very pretty girl [sigh] with whom I worked at the Metropolitan Opera—largely because (1) I needed more inputs than the amp offered (thereby hangs a tale of the AR SRC that can wait for another day) and (2) having just then bought a new Teledyne AR A-06 amp—which seemed to me then to be an order of magnitude superior to the old amp in every respect (it still does)—I no longer felt the need to keep the amp for old times' sake. Given the prices old units now get on eBay, how I wish I had! I thank the moderators for allowing me to offer my reminiscences. _________ P.S. I still have the ancillary paperwork included with the original AR amp. It does not include the Delrama line at the bottom. October 17, 2015, addendum. I located one of those old Kodak snaps I mentioned above. Though it's badly faded and shows the AR amp only from an angle, with a magnifying glass I can see a linear red smear at the right of the AR logo. In other words, I was dead wrong in writing above that the logo lacked the "Inc." (What was that I said about my memory?) At least I was right about the heat sink. Pardon me for stopping here, but there's a plate of crow waiting on the table, and bitter experience has taught me that it tastes even worse cold than warm!