Anyone Familiar With The AR-LST Loudspeaker?

These were kind of oddballs released 1970~1974 (the LST-2) with the same 12-inch woofer as the AR-3 but multiple, angled mids and tweeters.

Anyone heard a pair?

 

Many years ago. Used to demo them when I was slinging hi-fi. They weren't big sellers. They were pricey and extremely inefficient. Heavy too. Mark Levinson used them in the Cello era (I don't remember what changes he made or Acoustic Research may have made along the way). I would expect, with modern high powered amplification, that they should sound pretty good by today's standards.

 

I had a pair of these in the early 1970s. Very “smooth” sounding — from what I can recall. No blown tweeters, but they did take out the right channel of the Crown DC300 I had at the time.

 

Had a pair of LST-2 in the 90's, they ate power and blew tweeters, yes!

In addition to the power requirement they need a large surface to sit on, they're pretty wide and need a large room to image in due to the diagonal direction on the sides. I did not have any success with what they needed.

 

Hmm...I don't have the room. Mine's pretty small...but I've always been intrigued by those LSTs.

Blown drivers -- I'd forgotten about that problem with ARs (and I'm running some 3a's now), but now that I think about it I do recall it happening often with friends that had them in the '70s and '80s. I knew people with AR-9s, 90s, 11s...I had a pair of 14s in the late 70s.

I think the conclusion was if you didn't have gobs of high current reserve power you absolutely had to be careful about playing them at loud levels especially with rock. One rock fan friend with a Harman Kardon Citation 16 (150 wpc if I'm remembering right) routinely blew drivers out of his 9s. 150 wpc wasn't enough, not enough to go extra loud with Sticky Fingers or whatever...