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AR2 Another Great Find


DavidDru

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An audio collector friend of mine has been selling off most of his 2 garages full of stuff now for a few years.  today I went over to grab some Infinity RS2.5 empty cabinets for another friend he gave him for free and of course at the same time look to see what he still had.  He knows I like the various East Coast stuff as he did so he took me directly to that section of stuff.  AMongst the 5 different KLH and 6 different Advents he pointed over to a towel and said there are some AR's.  I took the towel off to expose an unfinished pine cabinet and pristine gold weave linen grille fabric with perfectly in-tact AR badges.  Turning them over the stickers identified them as AR2's.

They are like new without a blemish!  The pots turn like they were just installed last week and nothing was ever applied to the pine.  As I mentioned above there isn't a single hole or pull in the grille fabric.  All that was left to do we see if the drivers still worked okay which I was really hoping because I didn't want to have to pull the grilles that are glued or stapled or something and tucked pretty well along each edge it seems.

Hooked them up to my main system and viola!  They come to life! Everything is functioning like they just came out of the box new.  In fact they look so good I am surprised they didn't come with the boxes.  My guess is that they were put into a cabinet and only removed recently or something along those lines.

I am resting them on my 3's to get them to the correct height while horizontal of course.  Serial numbers B30755 and B29304.

 

 

 

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Wow those are beautiful. I came close to getting some 2's(could still if I wanted) yesterday, but was talked out of it because supposedly  they don't deliver much in the way of highs. 

How are you finding the highs to be adequate? The serial numbers on the one's I was considering were in the 60xxx range. And not free.

 

Congratulations on your fantastic find!!

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Yes i saw that thread SB.  I felt that price was too high.  

They are soft at the top.  I have only played some Miles and Diana Krall so far and the mids and lows are nice.  I had passed on other options in the past on specimens that needed attention that I did not feel was worth giving them.  Went the patient route and it paid off.  $100

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I totally agree AR-pro, and I am going to keep my eyes open for them.  I believe there are photos of the added electrostatic tweeter arrangement in old adds or whatever and maybe even over in Sams thread from the other day.

This was a very fortunate score at that price and with how great of condition they are in, any price would have been understandable - like new. not for their sound qualities, but for their rare collectability condition.  Having a pair come up this good locally is so lucky.  

Now that I have pine unfinished version here in person I can see the struggle many on here have had of what to do in terms of the finish.  These having had nothing on them ever, I think they will be staying that way.

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Congratulations David, very nice! AR 2 have an excellent woofer of medium/high sensitivity and an easy 8-ohms load , ideal with low-wattage tube amps. Unfortunately, the dual cone combo is very obsolete . I replaced it with a modern 1" silk dome crossed at 2 Khz , 12 db/oct. and  'm very satisfied. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/5/2016 at 2:00 AM, ar_pro said:

The Radio Shack Optimus Linaeum dipole tweeters might be a nice way to extend the high frequency response of the AR-2.

 

Or the MicroStatic super tweeters--they were designed to go with AR and KLH

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  • 3 weeks later...

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