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AR-3's in the house


Guest jcmjrt

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Guest jcmjrt

I saw an ad recently for a pair of AR-3s and though I certainly don't "need" another pair of speakers, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to have/listen to AR-3s at a reasonable price. The grill cloth is a little tired and one speaker has the infamous/too often present pot watermark on the top. The serial numbers are C41835 and C41832. Can anyone equate that with a year of manufacture? Overall, I'm quite impressed with the sound. On another board, someone told me that there are a pair of AR-3's at the Smithsonian. Very cool! It's nice to own a part of audio history that still functions well.

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>I saw an ad recently for a pair of AR-3s and though I

>certainly don't "need" another pair of speakers, I couldn't

>pass up the opportunity to have/listen to AR-3s at a

>reasonable price. The grill cloth is a little tired and one

>speaker has the infamous/too often present pot watermark on

>the top. The serial numbers are C41835 and C41832. Can anyone

>equate that with a year of manufacture? Overall, I'm quite

>impressed with the sound. On another board, someone told me

>that there are a pair of AR-3's at the Smithsonian. Very cool!

>It's nice to own a part of audio history that still functions

>well.

That serial range for the AR-3 would be 1963-1964 I believe. Certainly in that range. I could go back and probably pin it down further, but that is close I believe. In my experience, it is very difficult to restore AR-3's to their original performance. There is inevitable deterioration over time to the domes' suspension systems, but careful restoration can go a long way to getting the sound close to the original.

The AR-3 was (and is) an outstanding loudspeaker, and as we have said many times on this forum, it represented the pinnacle in loudspeaker engineering during the decade after its introduction in the late 1950s. It was the culmination of the genius of Edgar Villchur -- representing the famous 12-inch acoustic-suspension woofer and the first direct-radiator, dome tweeters. Incidentally, all loudspeakers with dome tweeters owe their existence to the first AR-3. Yet beyond the excellent performance of the AR-3 was the way in which this speaker was presented to the public. Disclosure articles by Villchur described the dome tweeters and methods of objective and subjective measurement techniques, the latter validated by the now-famous live-vs.-recorded demonstrations conducted across the US in which the AR-3 was compared to The Fine Arts Quartet, guitarist Gustavo Lopez and even a refurbished 1910 Seaburg Nickelodeon. In each comparison, members of the audience (there were over 70 Fine Arts Quartet live-vs.-recorded concerts conducted in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere) were asked to make a show of hands for those who felt they knew when the switchover took place. It became almost a laughing matter that practically no one could correctly identify the switchovers from live to recorded.

The significance of all this is that no loudspeaker company -- before or since -- has ever accomplished what AR did during the early 1960s with the AR-3 live-vs.-recorded demonstrations. AR had already validated the measurement test results with the AR-3 (flatter response, better off-axis and acoustic-power response and lower distortion than about any other loudspeaker), and the live-vs.-recorded demonstrations took "listening tests" to the highest level.

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/dc/user_files/404.jpg

AR-3 and Fine Arts Quartet

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/dc/user_files/407.jpg

AR-3 and guitarist Gustavo Lopez

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/dc/user_files/408.jpg

AR-3 and 1910 Seaburg Nickelodeon

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/dc/user_files/405.jpg

AR-3 on permanent display in Smithsonian Museum of American History

--Tom Tyson

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The wide ranging success of these demonstrations raises some interesting questions which IMO have never been satisfactorily addressed. Let's assume that most people who heard these deomonstrations including leading reviewers of the time agreed that AR3 was an exceptionally accurate loudspeaker, moreso than any other speaker and the only speaker to prove it in actual field trials among impartial audiences. Why wasn't it universally accepted as the only speaker to buy in that price range? Why didn't other manufacturers work to build identical sounding clones as closely as they could? Did much of the listening public prefer loudspeakers which were less accurate or which had some kind of inaccuracy purposely built in? Was there something about the way commercial recordings were made which made them sound less accurate when played through AR3 than through other speakers? Why wasn't AR3a manufactured to sound exactly like AR3? Did it overcome some shortcoming in AR3? Was it a concession to market preferences? Was it a deliberate step backward being less accurate than AR3 (a surprising suggestion)? I'd be interested to hear the thoughts and memories of people who were there or who spoke to people who were there when AR3a was conceived and created.

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