are there any modern woofers equal to ar3a woofer

[mantis]

I resurrected my ar3as, and to be expected, they kick ass. Now, I am simply wondering if there are any modern woofer units that are equal in capability to these things- they are just so massive and the bass is so detailed. I am trying to figure out what it would cost to manufacture a modern ar3a, because if it seems to me that if anybody could make these things for $1000 they could make an absolute fortune. Thanks guys

[Carlspeak]

As close as you're going to get is probably offered by AB Tech as a replacement woofer for the 3a.

[mantis]

As close as you're going to get is probably offered by AB Tech as a replacement woofer for the 3a.

How close is it? Ever heard it? I'm simply wondering why nobody makes 3a clones if they are so good- is it a patent issue?

[Carlspeak]

How close is it? Ever heard it? I'm simply wondering why nobody makes 3a clones if they are so good- is it a patent issue?

Haven't heard one but AB Tech guys are former AR employees who claim to have their selection of AR replacement drivers built for them to original (as possible I guess) specs.

Original patent issued in 1954 (#2775309). Doubt if it is still active.

[RoyC]

Haven't heard one but AB Tech guys are former AR employees who claim to have their selection of AR replacement drivers built for them to original (as possible I guess) specs.

Original patent issued in 1954 (#2775309). Doubt if it is still active.

Word has it that AB Tech can no longer get the replacement woofer (formerly known in this forum as the "Tonegen" woofer). As of right now there appears to be no new 3a replacement woofers available other than possible old stock sold by re-sellers, like Simply Speakers.

AB Tech tried to sell Ebay's "Vintage AR" a different replacement recently, and he brought them to me for testing. They were laughable. Things are not looking good in AB Tech land...No 3a woofer, no 3a mid, and a 3a tweeter that needs a crossover change to be acceptable. Don't throw away those old drivers.

Roy

[mantis]

Word has it that AB Tech can no longer get the replacement woofer (formerly known in this forum as the "Tonegen" woofer). As of right now there appears to be no new 3a replacement woofers available other than possible old stock sold by re-sellers, like Simply Speakers.

AB Tech tried to sell Ebay's "Vintage AR" a different replacement recently, and he brought them to me for testing. They were laughable. Things are not looking good in AB Tech land...No 3a woofer, no 3a mid, and a 3a tweeter that needs a crossover change to be acceptable. Don't throw away those old drivers.

Roy

why doesn't someone manufacture them to the same standards? Wouldn't people interested in them pay a premium anyway?

[soundminded]

I resurrected my ar3as, and to be expected, they kick ass. Now, I am simply wondering if there are any modern woofer units that are equal in capability to these things- they are just so massive and the bass is so detailed. I am trying to figure out what it would cost to manufacture a modern ar3a, because if it seems to me that if anybody could make these things for $1000 they could make an absolute fortune. Thanks guys

We've talked about reverse engineering classic AR speakers using currently available drivers a number of times in the past and it would be a considerable challenge. Modern design philosophy is different than the concepts most valued by AR and its close competitors discussed here at the time these speakers were made. While the best manufacturers today quietly use acoustic suspension designs, they don't talk about it much. Ported designs are popular because they can deliver low bass in a smaller box but it is clearly inferior quality bass to AR's 12" woofer. It's also impossible to find a tweeter with dispersion anything like the AR 3/4" driver used in AR3a, LST, 10pi and 11. Even AR9's tweeter does not equal their dispersion.

Until a few years ago, I would not have known of any woofer which could give the AR 12" a run for its money but recently, Dayton RSS315HF-8 12" "reference" high fidelity woofer appeared and it could challenge the AR driver up to around 200 hz. As with the Tonegen 1259, its plastic cone really restricts it to being used as a subwoofer but it seems to have the power and reach of the AR12" It's available from Parts Express as a separate part or as a powered subwoofer with a plate amplifier you can build yourself or buy pre-assembled. Since the woofer, enclosure, amplifier, and stuffing are available separately, you can build it as a passive subwoofer using their enclosure too if you want to. Its price seems very competitive. I would not try it in a 3 way system using a 2" dome midrange, I'd work around a 4 way system using an 8" high quality paper cone woofer. It seems to me even AR struggled with this problem for a long time. With AR3, the crossover was at around 1khz and the upper range of the woofer was a little on the rough side. With AR3a it was lowered to 575 and then 525 hz (?), an entire octave but there still seemed to me to have been a problem in the bass/midrange crossover region proably due to the dome's limitations at the low end of its rane. AR9 finally conceded to the difficulty by adding the 8" lower midrange driver which killed the problem off.

BTW, there are many variants on Dayton 12" designs including a high output version and similar products with different target markets in mind like their Titanic III and their infinite baffle version but this particular one is the only one they make which is a challenger for our purposes. I think someone else here used it and was quite impressed. I think it handles around 600 watts RMS, it's Fs is slightly higher than ARs, its Vas is low, and its Qes, Qm, and Qts are all low and has many features the AR has to reduce distortion so it makes an excellent choice for a small sealed enclosure. The only problem I see with the excellent Tonegen 1259 besides its usefulness only up to around 200 hz is its high Vas which requires a cabinet around twice the volume of the AR 12".

There have been some other suggestions here but to me they all had one fatal flaw or another. Remarkable how after fifty years, the original AR woofer design remains at the top of the heap, sure testimony to the incompetence of the competition.

[RoyC]

Even if an off-the-shelf woofer of exactly the same specs were available, the woofer basket/mounting frame would not fit the original cabinet's odd opening, making it useless as a drop-in replacement for the old woofer. If the original had been a standard size woofer, a copy would be easier to manufacture and would probably have more uses....and if there were sufficient demand for the original style, AB Tech would have ordered more to be made.

Roy

[genek]

Even if an off-the-shelf woofer of exactly the same specs were available, the woofer basket/mounting frame would not fit the original cabinet's odd opening, making it useless as a drop-in replacement for the old woofer. If the original had been a standard size woofer, a copy would be easier to manufacture and would probably have more uses....and if there were sufficient demand for the original style, AB Tech would have ordered more to be made.

This doesn't surprise me, since there doesn't seem to be much demand for speakers like the classic ARs. On most of my visits to audio stores these days I find myself listening to boxes with shrill highs and booming bass pumping out heavy metal that sound just awful when I get the salespeople to switch the source to something not made with amplified instruments. When I finally identify something that might have a chance of going up against our classic speakers for sound quality, it either won't fit into a bookshelf space or it costs as much as a small Toyota.

When the original woofers in my 1975 AR-2ax woofers went bad (about 10 years ago) I was still able to buy exact replacements from AB Tech. Next time around, I'll probably be giving the resurround/recone folks a shot at the old ones before I consider replacements.

[Diamonds&Rust]

I resurrected my ar3as, and to be expected, they kick ass. Now, I am simply wondering if there are any modern woofer units that are equal in capability to these things- they are just so massive and the bass is so detailed. I am trying to figure out what it would cost to manufacture a modern ar3a, because if it seems to me that if anybody could make these things for $1000 they could make an absolute fortune. Thanks guys

Problem - Nobody wants to make a "full-range" woofer anymore. If you figure a second order 525Hz crossover means the woofer is playing well up into the midrange, then you've defined a problem. The excursion of the woofer at 50Hz is larger than the wave at 1000Hz and you introduce all kinds of problems. (the cone is flexing some substantial percentage of the 1000Hz's demand for movement, you end-up with Doppler problems in a steady 800Hz tone, etc) That's the kind of problem that engineering would just as soon avoid.

When you take into consideration that modern 6.5" drivers can be made to play well into the bass region, then you've got this whole trade-off between adding a 12" for real woof, enlarging the cabinet to accommodate a 12" <less consumer acceptance>, cost to manufacture, etc.

Even if we just take it from a modern understanding of the issues involved, we'll have to admit that a 3a's design is really not very good. I can only imagine Ken K working on the 303 thinking, "Why am I doing this?! WHY am I trying to mate a 1.5" midrange with a 12" woofer?! This is insane!"

You and I know that little satellites sitting on shelves against a wall and an inexpensive subwoofer in a bandpass box across the room is really not an acceptable substitute. Whatever problem a 3 /3a might have, it's no worse (and yields a better result) than two little highly-accurate speakers which are going to be placed incorrectly in a room. But most people simply don't care.

They want it small, cheap, and "good-sounding."

So they go to BestCity and buy an little Bose system they auditioned from a distance of 3' in a barn where Shrek was playing on 107 TV sets at half-volume just behind them. They get it home, hide the woofer behind the cat, and put the dual 3" full-range drivers on a shelf and achieve one of their three wishes; it's small.

How many AR drivers would we have to order to get some Chinese plant to produce them? I'm guessing tens of thousands, but I have no way to know that. Then who would use them?

Looking around, I can't think of a single modern manufacturer that would even *try* to make a speaker with a 12" woofer playing up into the midrange. Not one.

That doesn't keep me from enjoying it.

[mantis]

Interesting points.

I have always wondered why nobody makes them- even if there is little demand, as soon as a chinese company starts putting out ar3a clones (you know they will, the chinese and japanese LOVE highfi sound now, they are going through our golden age), nobody will be able to compete. Better put out the real deal now, even if it isn't selling tons, otherwise it will be ripoffs.

Now the question is, can the 3a compete in these 1k-5k modern speakers? Lots of people are spending a lot of money on these dinky little cabinets that do not produce anything below 80 reliably (its so rolled off), isn't that a market right there? The people buying those would not care about size, they are already buying room treatment, stands, isolators, etc...

[Diamonds&Rust]

The people buying those would not care about size, they are already buying room treatment, stands, isolators, etc...

I'm with you, but if only people who cared were on the Titanic, there would have been lifeboats to spare. Manufacturers want all the traffic the price-point will bear.

Not to take anything away from our hobby, it has been and continues to be a lot of fun with really great results for so little money --- but I think we are on the threshold of a whole new way of getting the results you and I want from something completely different than anything we've experienced, and perhaps ever dreamed-of.

Physics is still physics and so there are some immutable truths like; 1) If you want bass, you gotta move some air, 2) If you want a reasonable soundstage, you have to either work with the room, or try to mimimize its effects, 3) Dispersion is affected by driver size and loading, 4) etc.

But we seem to be moving into an age were digital processing is complex enough, and fast enough, that a designer can "force" a driver to act in ways which seem to be against its nature. Imagine doing away with "Doppler effects" on the midrange produced by a large driver by calculating the proper correction to every combination of frequencies and amplitudes possible and applying the correction to the input signal on-the-fly. Would be amazing, wouldn't it?

I have not heard the speakers I'm about to mention. I am not touting them. I have no clue what they sound like. But they have *all* the problems I imagine could make a speaker designer curl-up in the fetal position and suck his thumb until someone made it go-away. And it is the problems inherent in the designs we like so much that make this germane to our forum.

Look at what they are doing here:

http://www.emeraldphysics.com

I can't imagine this working at any level. Yet, I'm assured it does, with spectacular results. It just seems so incredibly wrong in every way.

[soundminded]

I'm with you, but if only people who cared were on the Titanic, there would have been lifeboats to spare. Manufacturers want all the traffic the price-point will bear.

Not to take anything away from our hobby, it has been and continues to be a lot of fun with really great results for so little money --- but I think we are on the threshold of a whole new way of getting the results you and I want from something completely different than anything we've experienced, and perhaps ever dreamed-of.

Physics is still physics and so there are some immutable truths like; 1) If you want bass, you gotta move some air, 2) If you want a reasonable soundstage, you have to either work with the room, or try to mimimize its effects, 3) Dispersion is affected by driver size and loading, 4) etc.

But we seem to be moving into an age were digital processing is complex enough, and fast enough, that a designer can "force" a driver to act in ways which seem to be against its nature. Imagine doing away with "Doppler effects" on the midrange produced by a large driver by calculating the proper correction to every combination of frequencies and amplitudes possible and applying the correction to the input signal on-the-fly. Would be amazing, wouldn't it?

I have not heard the speakers I'm about to mention. I am not touting them. I have no clue what they sound like. But they have *all* the problems I imagine could make a speaker designer curl-up in the fetal position and suck his thumb until someone made it go-away. And it is the problems inherent in the designs we like so much that make this germane to our forum.

Look at what they are doing here:

http://www.emeraldphysics.com

I can't imagine this working at any level. Yet, I'm assured it does, with spectacular results. It just seems so incredibly wrong in every way.

I said above that IMO the people who work in this industry are not mentally up to the task and this is one of countless perfect examples. Even within the very limited paradigm of two channel stereophonic sound, if one were truly intent on designing and building loudspeakers which could produce sound like musical instruments produce, they would start and spend most of their time studying musical insturments to understand how they sound and why they sound the way they do. Knowing how important room acoustics are in affecting what the user hears, they would study this problem carefully too and build in provisions to compensate for different kinds of rooms they would be used in into their products as well. And knowing how many variables there are in the way recordings are made, they would build provisions to compensate for this in their system designs too. Woofers, tweeters, crossover networks and DSPs would be the last thing they would worry about, merely a means to a well defined end. Instead these are the first and often only things they worry about. How many companies that design speakers even own a piano or a violin? This is what they should be comparing their products to, not to other speakers. How many test their products against live music even with contrived recording the way AR did not to mention compare them playing commercial recordings to live music? This is why I say that any real improvement in the state of the art in the near term is hopeless. It can't happen until a much smarter crop of engineers and designers come along, people who have the mental equipment and want to make money by sloving the problem rather than just by creating a new variant on the failed concepts of the past. This isn't it.

[RoyC]

Interesting points.

I have always wondered why nobody makes them- even if there is little demand, as soon as a chinese company starts putting out ar3a clones (you know they will, the chinese and japanese LOVE highfi sound now, they are going through our golden age), nobody will be able to compete. Better put out the real deal now, even if it isn't selling tons, otherwise it will be ripoffs.

Now the question is, can the 3a compete in these 1k-5k modern speakers? Lots of people are spending a lot of money on these dinky little cabinets that do not produce anything below 80 reliably (its so rolled off), isn't that a market right there? The people buying those would not care about size, they are already buying room treatment, stands, isolators, etc...

Bret and Soundminded make very good points.

We would be kidding ourselves to think that the performance of the AR-3a cannot be easily duplicated or exceeded in any number of ways today. The real question is how many people desire to have full-range 60lb cabinets taking up real estate in their homes? ....AND that modern clone had better be mighty attractive to look at, or it won't matter how good that woofer sounds :-)!

Today, a speaker system that rolls off at 80hz has all kinds of "subwoofers", associated amplifiers, and signal processing available to support it. None of that existed in the day of the 3a. "Nostalgia" marketing would likely be the only reason for reproducing the 3a. Who knows, something like the two-way Large Advent might actually be more feasible to reproduce in that regard due to lower manufacturing costs, and the fact that more than hardcore audio enthusiasts were exposed to that acoustic suspension offering way back when.

BTW, AR continued to refine the 3/3a design when it replaced the 3a with the AR-11 and AR-10pi in the late 70's.

In the early 90's a vinyl clad 3a clone, the "AR-3a Limited", WAS produced in Asia. Had it been a success, we surely would have seen them over here. The 90's also brought us Ken Kantor's excellent modern 3a, the AR 303. AR drivers for these models, as well as all other AR drivers, were manufactured in Asia since the mid 1980's.

The hobbyist/enthusiast popularity of our old timers may not translate into general demand for new versions. The current interest in Asia seems to revolve around the fact that they ARE classics with original crossovers, etc, (even though the capacitors are probably no longer in spec :-)). ALL "original" is preferred, and commands the greatest interest and highest price.

Roy

[soundminded]

One thing that cannot be denied is that AR and KLH made an honest effort to create loudspeaker systems which sounded like actual musical instruments. They did as well as they could given the state of the art at the time of their manufacture. It also cannot be denied that their models were the most successful on the market in their era, between them probably accounting for half the sales to serious record collectors. AR may have been the last company to successfully exhibit a live versus recorded demonstration and that was over 30 years ago. Despite enormous strides in all technologies in general and in electronics in particular, this industry seems further away today from fulfilling its promise to artificially record and play music that sounds like real music than it was in the era when these "classics" were current. Ideas, not money is the real issue;

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/music/mes.../15/156147.html

TAS magazine's editors and reviewers lamented the same in a frank admission a year and a half ago and Gordon Holt, equipment reviewer for High Fidelity Magazine in the 1950s and founder of Stereophile Magazine in the early 1960s said pretty much the same. The fact is that the technology of this industry needs a complete rethink. Its best efforts binaural sound and quadraphonic sound proved failures. Even within the limited paradigm of stereophonic sound, everything new on the market is hype with no real improvements. The redbook digital compact disc and the modern transistor power amplifier, preamplifier, and other equipment like equalizers perform their functions flawlessly as far as electrical engineers are concerned and the cost has been brought very far down so that they are now easily affordable by just about anyone. But increased dissatisfaction with the results are not the result of flaws in this equipment but that they no longer exhibit flaws which mitigate flaws in other equipment such as loudspeakers. Classical music is where the rubber meets the road, where the wheat is separated from the chaff. From the nuances of tonality to the the critical role of acoustics which account for well over 90% of what is heard at many a live performance, so critical it becomes an inherent part of music itself, the fulfillment of this promise is well beyond the current state of the art. It's a fact engineers know but audiophiles refuse to accept in their endless search for what they imagine to be sonic perfection. And there are no end of manufacturers and retailers who will assist them in that search if it takes every last cent they've got. Some of them seem almost eager to keep at this futile effort forever, starting to look for the next piece of equipment to buy after they've barely gotten the last one out of its box. Is there any hope? The good news for people who pursue this hobby here is that accepting this fact, we can enjoy the legacy of an extinct breed whose best ideas few people have ever even heard of let alone desire to own.

[RoyC]

One thing that cannot be denied is that AR and KLH made an honest effort to create loudspeaker systems which sounded like actual musical instruments. They did as well as they could given the state of the art at the time of their manufacture. It also cannot be denied that their models were the most successful on the market in their era, between them probably accounting for half the sales to serious record collectors. AR may have been the last company to successfully exhibit a live versus recorded demonstration and that was over 30 years ago. Despite enormous strides in all technologies in general and in electronics in particular, this industry seems further away today from fulfilling its promise to artificially record and play music that sounds like real music than it was in the era when these "classics" were current. Ideas, not money is the real issue;

I agree, Soundminded...but the general definition of "real music" seems to have become muddied with time, and if a profit cannot be made marketing an idea, as AR did, it will not matter much if no new products are made available for use.

I think we sometimes forget that AR systems were developed at a time when electronically amplified music was not the typical way to experience "live" music. AR's live vs recorded demonstrations were acoustic. Concert hall acoustics were studied. The sound of an instrument that was not being electronically amplified into a given space was VERY relevant. At least initially, the majority of people who could afford AR speakers were music enthusiasts, and likely preferred classical and jazz, which was largely an "acoustic" experience. It was a great novelty to be able to bring some of this experience into the home.

An age that began as radio and Edison recordings and hurtled past affordable "hifi", "stereo" television, electronic amplification of instruments, popular music/rock concerts, "stereo" headphones, surround sound movie theaters, home theater, synthesized music making devices, mp3/ipods, etc, ultimatley changed the rules. The one common element is that ALL of these things are experienced through speakers of some sort. Most concerts are experienced, and all recordings are mixed, through very conventional speakers. Most folks have little idea, or for that matter care, what the "instruments" actually sound like in person. They have no frame of reference. People today hear "live music" AFTER they have heard it electronically amplified through some sort of speaker. In fact, they generally hope the "live" music sounds "as good" as the recording they first heard! It really doesn't matter for the purpose of this discussion what speaker they heard it through first. It was a speaker. For that matter most "live" music is electronically amplified and heard through speakers today as well, and the recordings at home DO indeed sound better in many cases :-).

Of course I am not taking into consideration the fact that there are still concert halls and enthusiasts dedicated to classical music and other primarily acoustic musical experiences. It is just that the market does not seem to perceive a need to provide "special" home audio speakers for that niche. On the other hand, I would love to hear your Bose 901 and AR-9 tweaks...but that's just me:-).

Roy

[Diamonds&Rust]

Soundminded - You might as well just give-it-up. I would be on your side if I could conceive of the result you want, but I can't. You don't want the Chicago Symphony in your livingroom. It wouldn't sound natural, or right, or anything else. You want the **illusion** that you are in THEIR space, in a good seat.

You might as well just buy a DAC1 and a set of Sennheiser 650s and start scarfing-up every binaural recording you can find. Maybe you'd find the old quadraphonic headphones and quad recordings (the few there were) more convincing.

But there is no way, at all, period, zilch, nada, zero that anyone can take your room and put a completely accurate recording in it (following some new holographic recording technique) played on the *actual* instruments on the recording, and have it sound right. For that you need an anechoic chamber with M.C. Escher furniture and a gross of Klein bottle speakers each playing a discrete channel as recorded by engineers using the Heisenberg principle for mic placement. (Statistically figuring out where the best chances are - rather than where the best place seems to be, this-time.)

A kind of audio diorama with no empty space. Maybe build a 3' dome... an audio planetarium... an auditarium. And build one over your seat in Carnegie Hall with a gross of perfect microphones placed around the outside, spaced perfectly unsymmetrically... It would probably work as well as the cone of silence in old Get Smart episodes.

In fact, I can see it now - We get some guy to wear a 3' Styrofoam head, laced with microphones, into the auditorium and take the best seat in the house. Then to play it back you just get this 3' head full of speakers in the same position and one of those things that shakes your chair during powerful bass and... well, I'm sure someone out there has considered this before.

Frankly, it would probably be cheaper and more effective to take some form of hallucinogen... in quantity. Daily.

Or why not just buy a bunch of tickets to performances, killing three birds with one stone - You'd spend all the stereo money on live music, you wouldn't have time to listen to anything at home, and if from your seat the 10kHz band needs adjusting or the Steinway needed another couple of tweeters firing at the ceiling to just sound just right - you'd *have* to relax and enjoy the music.

Even a macro-magnified HD video of the beach won't get sand up your...shirt. Can't hang-ten off the end of a board riding a Sharp Aquos wave no matter how well it has been recorded.

What you seem to be wishing for is not, in my opinion, doable. At all. Ever. The laws of physics aren't going to allow it. The laws of drugs aren't going to allow the right hallucinogens, either. I guess we're screwed.

Merry almost Christmas, y'all.

Bret

[Carlspeak]

One thing that cannot be denied is that AR and KLH made an honest effort to create loudspeaker systems which sounded like actual musical instruments. They did as well as they could given the state of the art at the time of their manufacture. It also cannot be denied that their models were the most successful on the market in their era, between them probably accounting for half the sales to serious record collectors. AR may have been the last company to successfully exhibit a live versus recorded demonstration and that was over 30 years ago. Despite enormous strides in all technologies in general and in electronics in particular, this industry seems further away today from fulfilling its promise to artificially record and play music that sounds like real music than it was in the era when these "classics" were current. Ideas, not money is the real issue;

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/music/mes.../15/156147.html

TAS magazine's editors and reviewers lamented the same in a frank admission a year and a half ago and Gordon Holt, equipment reviewer for High Fidelity Magazine in the 1950s and founder of Stereophile Magazine in the early 1960s said pretty much the same. The fact is that the technology of this industry needs a complete rethink. Its best efforts binaural sound and quadraphonic sound proved failures. Even within the limited paradigm of stereophonic sound, everything new on the market is hype with no real improvements. The redbook digital compact disc and the modern transistor power amplifier, preamplifier, and other equipment like equalizers perform their functions flawlessly as far as electrical engineers are concerned and the cost has been brought very far down so that they are now easily affordable by just about anyone. But increased dissatisfaction with the results are not the result of flaws in this equipment but that they no longer exhibit flaws which mitigate flaws in other equipment such as loudspeakers. Classical music is where the rubber meets the road, where the wheat is separated from the chaff...........

Yes, Soundminded, but the wheat has already been separated from the chaff. The consumer market has already made it's decision...... It's all about the music - not so much the sound of the music. It's become self-evident in the mass marketplace shift toward convenience and portability we see all around us. I have to agree with Bret on this one.

There will always be a small minority of purists who want the sound of the music to be as pure as possible. Look at the minor resurgence of vinyl and tubes! It's a glaring example of a niche market in the audio hobbyists's world being satisfied. Those folks believe, and perhaps rightly so, that analog is more 'musical' than digital in spite of all the DAC's. However, that's the front end of the audio chain. They don't talk much about the back end (i.e. loudspeakers). They seem content with what they have.

At this point, I suspect, if the perfect loudspeakers were developed to perfectly reproduce concert hall acoustics, it wouldn't make much of a dent in the audio marketplace. Of course, the niche market of purists will buy them, but I doubt if it would have the same effect the development of AS speakers had in the 50's. It's too late, the masses have spoken.......

[kkantor]

Wow, great discussion, all around!

-k

[Steve F]

> At this point, I suspect, if the perfect loudspeakers were developed to perfectly reproduce concert hall acoustics, it wouldn't make much of a dent in the audio marketplace.—Carl

> I think we sometimes forget that AR systems were developed at a time when electronically amplified music was not the typical way to experience "live" music….People today hear "live music" AFTER they have heard it electronically amplified through some sort of speaker.—Roy C

These viewpoints mirror points I have also made many times in previous posts, and I think they’re spot on. Today, convenience is king, and as long as playback quality is at some moderately-acceptable level—relatively clear, free from obvious gross distortion, with reasonable detail—then the convenience of the medium is what matters to today’s consumer. Almost any downloaded music/MP3 player can clear the above quality hurdle.

I think one thing that is so hard for people in the mid-40’s and above age bracket to grasp—REALLY grasp—is that there is NO “audio marketplace” anymore. We grew up in our teens and twenties with an awareness of, and then a keen interest in, the “audio industry.” Some of us even went into it as a profession. But the stand-alone audio marketplace no longer exists. Again, as I’ve said before, look at the demise of the audio enthusiast magazines and the independent stand-alone audio specialist store. Stereo Review used to have a circ of a half-million, but now they’re called ‘Sound & Vision’ and their circ is barely 250K. We have a lottery going as to when they go out of business. Full-page ads used to go for 20 grand in SR; now S&V runs ‘promos’ and specials and gives pages away for less than half that.

Audio is just one aspect of the consumer entertainment market these days. There is no ‘speaker market’ anymore the way we remember (lament) it and virtually all these stand-alone speaker companies will not survive in their present form, using their present business model, for more than another 5 to 10 years, tops. Serious, stand-alone speakers are well on their way to being the cassette decks and stereo integrated amplifiers of tomorrow.

None of the forgoing—even though it’s absolutely, indisputable true—means that historical speakers is not a great hobby, because it is a great hobby. It’s just not a current market anymore, and never will be again.

Steve F.

[soundminded]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet Act 1, scene 5

This unwarranted pessimism seems entirely unreasonable to me. It is true that for decades this industry has been stagnant, its intellect atrophied to the point of seeming disappearance and it shows no signs of even the slightest shred of imagination or creative thinking but that doesn't mean it's dead forever. Just until people are no longer willing to pay $20,000 to $100,000 for newly hyped variants of the same old junk and try to fool themselves into thinking that they actually have something. Why should anyone make the effort if they can skate by on decades old technology tweaked to the max? Perhaps the best scientists and engineers in the world felt they had more important and interesting problems to solve in the recent past.

When I reached 50, I reflected on my life and now that I'm nearing 60, I reflect even more. 50 years before I was born in 1948, the world was about horse drawn carriages and gaslight. The automobile and sound recording were little more than curiousities. The first plane had never flown. Radio didn't exist yet. Television was science fiction. There were no antiboitics.

Fifty years ago last October, the first satellite was launched into orbit. It was the size of a basketball and had a small radio transmitter that went beep beep. Twelve years later, America accomplished the first of three successful missions to put men on the moon and we have close up photos of all the planets taken by deep space probes. We have a permanent space station, a telescope that can see billions of lightyears away and two rovers crawling around on mars sending home picture postcards. Fifty years ago, a television camera was the size of a refrigerator, today it's the size of a pencil eraser and you can hold an entire television studio in the palm of your hand. Fifty years ago, a computer was the size of a bulding, today one a million times as powerful can sit on your lap and can instantly communicate with a billion others. In seconds you can read any page of any publication in any of millions of libraries. Fifty years ago, two lightweights had recently won the Nobel Prize having stolen the secret of the structure of DNA from an English X-Ray crystalographer (Rosalind Franklin) and today we have not only decoded the entiere human genome, we are re-engineering living cells by altering their DNA to suit. And you would have me believe that it is impossible to figure out how to recreate the sound field around someone's head at a musical performance.

I may be a minority of one but all I can say is that we can agree to disagree. I think something new and extraordinary will come along which will astonish us and will be so different from what we now are accostomed to most people will want it for themselves. And they may be able to get it, it may not be all that expensive once it's developed and had a few years on the market. Not only will the problem of accurate concert hall acoustics be solved but the benefits will extend to enhancing all kinds of music in ways we have not imagined. I think this will come from surprising directions, the result of powerful new insight into acoustics, the way our hearing works and the way our brains interpret what we hear. I cannot say if it will come in 5 years or 25 years but I have no doubt that it will come and when it does, it will render our existing best technology as obsolete as AM radio.

[kkantor]

Agreed. A quick estimate:

At the absolute peak of its commercial success, AR had total annual sales of less than what is currently sold every week in the "portable MP3 player" category. This year, Nintendo spent just about as much on advertising as the sum total $$ of every AR speaker ever made. Component hifi never was a truely mass-market product.

-k

[Carlspeak]

Agreed. A quick estimate:

At the absolute peak of its commercial success, AR had total annual sales of less than what is currently sold every week in the "portable MP3 player" category. This year, Nintendo spent just about as much on advertising as the sum total $$ of every AR speaker ever made. Component hifi never was a truely mass-market product.

-k

Thanks Ken for the reality check.

[genek]

Agreed. A quick estimate:

At the absolute peak of its commercial success, AR had total annual sales of less than what is currently sold every week in the "portable MP3 player" category. This year, Nintendo spent just about as much on advertising as the sum total $$ of every AR speaker ever made. Component hifi never was a truely mass-market product.

-k

So Ken, if we can put you on the spot for a moment, if you had to pick the currently-manufactured speaker that comes closest to the design philosophy and sound "flavor" of a classic AR-3a (or your successor, the 303a), what would it be?

[Pete B]

I resurrected my ar3as, and to be expected, they kick ass. Now, I am simply wondering if there are any modern woofer units that are equal in capability to these things- they are just so massive and the bass is so detailed. I am trying to figure out what it would cost to manufacture a modern ar3a, because if it seems to me that if anybody could make these things for $1000 they could make an absolute fortune. Thanks guys

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/vintage/.../15/154974.html

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/vintage/.../15/155031.html

Far superior to the AR1/3 woofer:

http://www.acoustic-visions.com/~acoustic/...drivers/shivax/