Tar painted cone on AR6

[Guest marcopa]

I have included a jpg of one my pops AR6's I took the grills off (I am fairly certain for the first time)and found this tarred cone. I spoke with Miller Sound and he felt it was part of the experimental that went on at AR. He seemed to think it need not be fussed with. I am bothered by the thing and would like to here abit more. Any imput?

Thanks Chris at Marcopa

989.txt

[tysontom]

>I have included a jpg of one my pops AR6's I took the grills

>off (I am fairly certain for the first time)and found this

>tarred cone. I spoke with Miller Sound and he felt it was

>part of the experimental that went on at AR. He seemed to

>think it need not be fussed with. I am bothered by the thing

>and would like to here abit more. Any imput?

>

>Thanks Chris at Marcopa

Chris,

I do not believe that the woofers installed in your pop's AR-6s are original. There are several reasons why: (1) AR never used woofers with the front-mounted cardboard protection for the surround (also allowing for "back-mounting" on a baffle), (2) the tar-like cone coating is nothing that I am aware that AR ever used (Allison Acoustics' Roy Allison, also the designer of the AR-6, did coat Allison woofers with a butyl-rubber coating, but never any tar-like substance); (3) the dust cap appears to be different from any standard unit used by AR in the early days and (4) the hot-melt glue points on the front baffle are different from the standard placement that AR used on the production line.

Many repairs to AR speakers were done and the grills re-attached using USM hot-melt glue, readily available. I would suspect that somewhere along the line a replacement woofer was put in place of the original. The foregoing is my opinion, of course, but I am pretty confident that these woofers are not AR items.

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/dc/user_files/991.jpg

Fig.1 AR-6 woofer cone (early version) with ribbed cone. Slight variation with later cones.

You might want to locate original woofers on eBay that you could retrofit into the AR-6s; this way you would be sure of the original performance. At the same time, you could go in and check over the crossover and clean the level controls (if it is that earlier version). The AR-6 woofer has a long-overhang voice coil, and the speaker has the same system resonance as the larger AR-2ax and AR-5 series, so the bass response from the AR-6 is outstanding -- so long as you have the original woofers! Good luck! We'll try to help you get them back to original condition.

--Tom Tyson