James Bond Posted November 25, 2010 Report Share Posted November 25, 2010 I have my AR3a's up and working. I rebuilt the crossover's, cleaned the pots and re-foamed the woofers. I did not refinish the cabinets yet or clean the grill cloth. It's really hard for me to give a description of the sound. My son listened to them and his first words were they were clean sounding and no noise. I matched this up with my Eico ST-40 which I just finished rebuilding also some months ago. So everything has been rebuilt with new capacitors. I suspect that over time they will all break in more and get use to each other. My 20 watt Eico seems to have plenty of power pushing these. It's not bass shy at all and I'm using the 8 ohm taps. I haven't tried the 4 ohm taps yet. Maybe a higher power tube amp will bring the bass out even more and I just don't know the difference right now. I have found that classical, rock, jazz and vocals all sound good. My investment in these speakers was a little over $100.00. I bought them for around $30-35. The re-foam kit was $25 and the capacitors were around $50.00. The pots were in excellent condition. I bought the Axion capacitors at Parts Connextion they were having a 50% sale. I will add more pics later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JKent Posted November 26, 2010 Report Share Posted November 26, 2010 what a great buy! Nice job. Are those the famous Vishay MKP 1837 bypass caps? If so, what is your opinion?Please post photos of the finished speakers. Assume you're following the 3a restoration "bible" here.Kent Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmad40blue Posted December 19, 2010 Report Share Posted December 19, 2010 Those pots still look like they could use quite a bit of cleaning. How thorough were you in that process? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mexicomike Posted December 19, 2010 Report Share Posted December 19, 2010 "My 20 watt Eico seems to have plenty of power pushing these"Be very careful at anything more than moderate listening levels because it does NOT really have the power to "push" these speakers and there is a real danger of blowing out a tweeter due to distortion at levels that may not seem all that loud. I did that several times back in the day - each totally covered by AR - but they won't fix it now! I blew out drivers on 2axs and 3a's with a 40WPC amp. When I switched to a 200WPC amp (PL 400) I never blew out another driver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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