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The first AR....???


lakecat

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  • 3 weeks later...

Saw an auction on Ebay and seller claims it could be the first AR . I thought the experts here could verify or dispute this claim. Item number is 281390995617.

That is not an AR speaker. The AR-1 was the first model.

Roy

Yeah, Roy is 100% correct. That eBay item was not an AR speaker—it was not even close. It appeared to be a homemade speaker using stiffly suspended paper surround, probably a Jensen woofer. It only resembled an AR speaker, but the buyers on eBay knew it wasn't an early AR, and they only paid around $60 for it. AR-1s regularly sell for $1500-2000 each, or more, on eBay now.

The earliest-known AR speaker is AR-1 Serial Number 0006. It was essentially a hand-assembled version made for early demonstrations or high-fidelity shows, and it was made late in the summer of 1954. It wound up in a thrift shop in Palm Springs, California 50 years later.

Tom Tyson

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None of this looks right to me. I've never seen one but there is a clear story about how the first AR acoustic suspension speaker was created. The story has it that the surround was cut from a bed sheet by Villchur's wife who had skills to do this acquired I think during the war. The entire idea was to created a woofer with a loose suspension and to get away from the stiff accordion pleated suspension used even today by pro speakers. Perhaps the woofer in the left photo is a work in progress. The frame looks right, the magnet looks right, but the suspension looks wrong. It almost looks like someone else's design is being adapted by AR. Perhaps this was being trialed as an early prototype.

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Wonder what ever happened to this one?

The prototype shown in the picture was hand-built of plywood by Edgar Villchur in 1953, and it was the basis for the acoustic-suspension patent. It was an enclosure 19" x 19" x 11" approximately, and included only the woofer with no high-frequency unit. The woofer was a Western Electric 728B (one of two purchased), mainly because all Western Electric drivers could be disassembled and then reassembled by removing screws, etc. Villchur had his wife, a skilled seamstress during WWII, sew the "skiver" out of mattress ticking to replace the original corrugated paper that came with the original 728. This material was glued to the woofer cone. Some changes might have been made to the spider as well, with the intention of reducing the free-air resonance (fs) into the subsonic region of around 16 Hz or so. This was done to bring up the system resonance (fc) to the desired 43-45 Hz, deemed the lowest frequency for most bass instruments. The 2-inch voice coil used in the WE 728 -- which had very little "overhang" in the voice-coil gap -- was retained, but the first "standard" AR-1 of 1954 used a much-superior "in house" 12-inch woofer (which we all know so well today) with a 5/8-inch overhang voice coil and larger Alnico magnet, cloth surround and heavier cone, etc., far superior to the prototype. The second 728B was mounted in an infinite-baffle arrangement, and it was compared with the sealed-box prototype with respect to frequency response, distortion and so forth.

The original, hand-built prototype shown in the pictures was eventually taken from Woodstock to Acoustic Research's Cambridge, Massachusetts factory around 1955 or 1956, and it was placed in the men's bathroom to provide background music. It may still be there, but it is likely that it was dismantled and hauled away somewhere.

--Tom Tyson

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