Another modern version of the classic Dynaco A-25, from Annandale Acoustics

How about Zu or Omega? The higher end Klipsch? Certainly not much.

 

Oh, man, I'm gonna dump my Dynaudio Contour S3.4s and pick up a pair of those! Think of that! 4 midrange drivers!

What makes that thread such a great read is that the guy who is restoring those Marantz' is so excited about them.

 

And whose ear might that be?

 

Well, Advent did come out with a 20th Anniversary edition in the 90's--with a different driver, different cabinet, different sound, different everything. At least it looked a little like the Large Advent.

The Large Advent was nice for what it was, and certainly didn't sound objectionable, especially with rock, but its sound was relatively colored and it did not image well. You definitely *knew* there were two speakers in the room, and the sound was emanating from within the speakers, rather than being suspended in front of them.

The coloration was relatively unusual, too--warm and seductive on the bottom end (a GOOD thing!) and a little harsh and brittle on the top (uh, no comment). The disconnect between the sound emanating from the woofer and that from the tweeter contributed to the imaging problems I noticed. I understand that for its day, the Large Advent was considered uncolored and a good imager, but speaker technology has progressed a lot in 40 years!

I have heard that Large Advents offered much better sound and imaging when stacked vertically, tweeter-to-tweeter. I always wanted to try that, but I never had the opportunity, having sold my Large Advents over 10 years ago.

 

Did you even know there was such a thing as "imaging" in the '70s? I sure didn't. I used my Large Advents as nighttables when I first got them, and it never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with the sound. Ignorance was definitely bliss.

 

I didn't know a lot of things in the 1970's--especially because I was in grade school! However, all my music listening while growing up in the 1970's and 80's was on the Large Advents, and they became my own in the 1990's, having "inherited" them from my father in 1987 and kept them (along with various other speakers) through college and law school until around 1997.

 

.....and I sold a brand new pair of them myself!

I was working at a big-box store in the early/mid 90s which sold the majority of Advent's model line-up. Yea they definitely were different than the original LA: soft-dome parabolic tweeter instead of the "fried egg" cone/dome tweeter (this tweeter debuted in the very early 80s); the woofer was basically the one from the second LA and didn't share the first LA's funky 12" frame-but-ten-inch-cone design; and the cabinet shared the 2nd LA's real walnut rounded "bull nose" front styling.

This version, the older LAs and the Laureate & Heritage models which all used the soft-dome tweeter were all very smooth to me, sometimes a little bit too smooth with certain music but not enough to bother me (as you mentioned yourself, I have also heard others say the cone/dome tweeter could get harsh at higher volume levels, even when they were new).

The Anniversary's included numbered metal serial plates on the back with a note indicating "limited edition" or something to that effect, though I cannot remember how many pairs were manufactured.

IIRC they went for $549 per pair in 1994(?) and we sold every pair we received, usually within a couple weeks at most. The last pair is the one I sold. We has just set one up on the shelf & the other was still in the box when a 20-something couple walked in. The woman spotted them immediately - though this was a common event to happen with both sexes since all the Advents had the nicest & most furniture-like styling of all the speakers we sold - she listened to the one speaker for just a few seconds, talked to her husband for a few minutes and they bought them. She said her dad had owned a pair and that she had good memories of them & did not need a full audition. Me and my boss were a little sad to see them go!

 

My Large Advents were from circa 1974 and had vinyl-clad utility cabinets with square edges, grill cloths made out of a rough fabric that looked like woven twine, no "Advent" logos on the grills, the 10" woofers in 12" heavy steel baskets, with a masonite ring between the gray foam edge of the driver and the steel basket, and the first version of the "fried egg" tweeter (mounted on a diamond-shaped piece of fiberboard, with a metal grill but without the two wire leads sticking out of either side as seen on later versions; they were also made out of an orange crumbly styrofoam-like material, as opposed to a green material seen in some later versions).

 

As I said, if you want a more romantic, lush sounding speaker, these might be for you.

 

I'm running Double Stacked NLA's in my main system.
Changing out that old, inexpensive looking capacitor definately cleaned up the highs.
It still is a very impressive speaker. But don't take my word for it.

- Sushimaster

 

Or your choice from many, much better, brand new speakers with the latest technology.
-Bill

 

Being assembled here from parts made where they can get them, is 100% legitimate "Made in USA". If they get the large portion of the parts here (the cabinets) and made the x-overs here rather than use foreign sub-assemblies, then they qualify. I think to be fair, we need to recognize that just about every complex product was built this way after the '50s. Things just became available from other places and were incorporated into US designs.

An example of a sham would be a product that was simple and all of its parts were sourced from a foreign source and then it only took a few seconds to snap or screw together, then slap a "Made in" sticker on it. That sort of thing is illegal.
-Bill

 

Sure there are. Not many for hi-fi use to be certain as they are rather complex but there are US driver makers and there are US cabinet makers. The guitar and pro market use some of these but they are becoming the exception now also due to lower prices from the east.
-Bill

 

Does NHT make their own drivers?

I still prefer to buy American whenever possible...

- Sushimaster

 

But I'll bet they don't hit 40Hz with the same authority and "punch" that a ported single 10" driver can provide - to me there's just something special about a single large woofer (improved lower midrange? colored upper mids? I dunno!) that a skinny tower speaker with multiple small woofers cannot duplicate. Plus they don't - and I'll admit this is HIGHLY subjective - have the personality this no-nonsense/politically-incorrect speaker system embodies. Dynaudio's decision makers also must have seen something special in it to approve its manufacture, and it looks like they still do since they recently introduced a slightly smaller version using an 8" woofer (the DM 2/8)*, another design that was enormously popular back in the day before the current "hear it but don't see it" attitude took over the speaker marketplace. It's like we're supposed to feel embarrassed about owning a decent audio system!

* this configuration is one of my favorites (my Boston CR9s share it): the midrange spectrum can still be reproduced with acceptable accuracy but there is still plenty of bass available for many genres of music in smaller rooms and lower-powered amps, and there is only one crossover point to worry about. Plus they're good candidates for use with a subwoofer since that 8" driver can easily handle the 80Hz crossover point vs. some anemic 3 inch "woofer" knocking itself out try to keep up and causing an unmusical dip around that region.

 

Or an Acoustically suspended one for that matter...

- Sushimaster

 

Since the company was sold a long time ago I'm sure they're Chinese now, but in the mid-90s when I was doing some work there Cambridge Soundworks was still manufacturing their own woofers.

 

I have heard few ported speakers that have the smooth-n-rich bass that most acoustic-suspension woofers produce. Speaking of that I've always wanted to hear the loudspeakers designed and built by Allison Acoustics, another believer in the a.s. system*, and also because of their unconventional design concepts used to help them better integrate into the typical listener's room at home. FYI: Roy Allison was a colleague of Edward Villchur, who along with Henry Kloss came up with the acoustic-suspension bass system.


* unlike most speakers of the day, their woofers were almost always located right next to a room's reinforcing surface ie. the floor or a wall, which just like a modern subwoofer can really augment what one hears at the listening position. And their floorstanders had their mids (commonly crossed over at @350Hz, another uncommon practice of the day but common now) and tweeters located much higher on the baffle, so imaging was optimized. Among others, Boston Acoustic's A200 used the same concept.

 

If the tweeter had deteriorated that much, maybe that's where that harsh quality originated.

 

I recently restored three pairs of Allison Acoustics loudspeakers. Model One, Model Four, and Model Six. It was interesting to see them again. Sealed boxes can indeed sound great but they are inefficient. Allison used dome midrange drivers in the Model One.

I am not a fan of the big drivers in two way systems other than the Tannoy Dual Concentric designs. I think 8" is the limit that a traditional, two driver, single baffle, two-way speaker system can support and still have low distortion. We took in on trade an older set of Tannoy two-way speakers in one of their older, more affordable series, I think these were called the Comet series, using discrete drivers (separate tweeter and woofer). As good as the Tannoy products are, that design was just too awkward to be considered as hi-fi these days. Even a Dual Concentric driver, when you have a small design, 8" is the sweet spot for efficiency, LF extension, and still having a reasonably clean and fast midrange. Beyond that, the boxes necessarily get huge to support the LF extension and the efficiency is greater to offset the drivers mass.

10" is a good size for a woofer and in a traditional speaker, it just creates too large a baffle and phasing problems with a two-way design. That's even if some mfr could produce a 10" driver with the speed required for low coloration. I think one real issue with the speed is LF extension. It works against the recovery time of the driver as excusions are longer for the lower frequencies. That's one reason to cross the drivers over with a high pass filter to shield them from the longer wave lengths. Several other problems with them too that I can think of off the top of my head but it gets into another thread really. It's enough to say that it's not an ideal way of designing a two way system as evidenced by so many mfrs over the years since. Even back in the day that the large baffle and woofer were popular, the systems were three-way or four-way with smaller mid range drivers utilized. IMO, HF reproduction was the greatest problem back then.
-Bill

 

Maybe, but it didn't seem to have deteriorated over the years (although the woofer surrounds had) and I've heard other examples of the tweeter that had the same bright, brittle sound. By using the terms "crumbly" and "styrofoam," I didn't mean to suggest that the tweeter was actually crumbling or made of styrofoam--I just wanted to convey was the material it was made out of looked like.

I could have just as easily said the tweeter was made out of an orange circus-peanut-like material.

 

The crossover is just a cap and resistor in series with the tweeter, the woofer is run full-range. That feature is a necessary element in the A-25 formula. I think the cap is 4.7uF, but don't hold me to it.

Still, the idea of paying $2500 for a re-creation of a $75 speaker just rubs me the wrong way.

 

Their one true disadvantage I'll admit, but with some extra $$ invested that can be overcome (though I know that isn't a "green" solution ).

Oh I know the 10" two-way has issues, but for more "casual" listening situations especially with typical rock/pop recordings, I think it can work out well.

I appreciate all the interesting information you took the time to write.

Gotcha. I thought about checking the texture of the green tweeters used in my Smaller Advents, but am a little spooked as far as trying to poke something through that mesh to do so.

Same here.

 

Sounds like what certain EPI models in the late 60s and 70s - they used only a capacitor (linky) - that used an 8" woofer paired with a 1" inverted dome tweeter. There's something to be said about such an elegantly simple xover system, but obviously the drivers have to tailored for that application (EPI built their own drivers, so it was easy for them to implement such a design).

I still see speakers using these gentle 6dB per octave crossovers, but most of the time they include other components, probably contour networks to shape the tweeter's or midrange's response.

 

I just received the May 2010 issue of Stereophile, within which Art Dudley reviews a pair of Large Advents that he restored. Imagine that! His observations were almost scarily the same as mine--bright, raspy top end, weak stereo imaging, good low frequency extension--and also a caveat that they sounded much better than his reviewspeak suggests!

My sentiments exactly.