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Live symphony experience


ironlake

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I had been listening to my large original advents ever since 1970 and was used to that sound,. Then a couple of years ago when on vacation to Vancouver, BC we attended a live orchchestra concert and was I surprised. The violins sounded so smooth and rich compared to the harsh sound I was used on the the Large Advent I stopped listening to strings on the LA,s and used the sound of my klh model 21 connected to an ar 4x and they sound so nice on the strings.

Now I saved my money and got a pair of totaly restored pair of ar 3a,s and now my system is back on my listening list of classical music.

If anyone is interested my beautiful orginal made in dec of 1969 large advents are for sale, cabinets are perfect, woofer refoamed by simply speakers a few years back, has the original pink fiberglass inside, even the wires to the woofer have pink glued to them. Woofer is of course the masonite type, the front panel is not black but light brown. Tweeter is the one with the point of the masonite sightly angled towards the right with the extra masonite block under it to hold the grill out. The front grills are still perfect and have the window screen in the tweeter hole for protecting the tweeters, They came with no screen protectant on the tweeters, they now (tweeter) have the metal mesh glued on them which was supplied by advent to me latter to glue on. the tweeters are in excellent condition with still a bright red color as they never were played loud enough to get hot and turn dark red, thes speakers are in new condition.

Make offer to annie175@live.com

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I had been listening to my large original advents ever since 1970 and was used to that sound,. Then a couple of years ago when on vacation to Vancouver, BC we attended a live orchchestra concert and was I surprised. The violins sounded so smooth and rich compared to the harsh sound I was used on the the Large Advent I stopped listening to strings on the LA,s and used the sound of my klh model 21 connected to an ar 4x and they sound so nice on the strings.

Now I saved my money and got a pair of totaly restored pair of ar 3a,s and now my system is back on my listening list of classical music.

If anyone is interested my beautiful orginal made in dec of 1969 large advents are for sale, cabinets are perfect, woofer refoamed by simply speakers a few years back, has the original pink fiberglass inside, even the wires to the woofer have pink glued to them. Woofer is of course the masonite type, the front panel is not black but light brown. Tweeter is the one with the point of the masonite sightly angled towards the right with the extra masonite block under it to hold the grill out. The front grills are still perfect and have the window screen in the tweeter hole for protecting the tweeters, They came with no screen protectant on the tweeters, they now (tweeter) have the metal mesh glued on them which was supplied by advent to me latter to glue on. the tweeters are in excellent condition with still a bright red color as they never were played loud enough to get hot and turn dark red, thes speakers are in new condition.

Make offer to annie175@live.com

Hi there

You were likely at the Orphuem Theatre here?

I suspect something is wrong with the tweeters or caps for your highs to sound so bad, unusual.

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No, the speakers are fine. I compared the sound of the large advents afew years after I purchased them to a pair of ar 3a,s and with tweeter switch on the decrease setting the advents started to sound much better on strings.

The advent that I was the most impressed with for string sound was the heritage speakers. I feel they were the best that advent ever made. The only drawback is they do not have the very deep bass that the LA have.

The vancover concert was at a large symphony hall and it was called a prom and was right downtown.

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  • 2 months later...

Concerning the "harsh sound" you had become accustomed to from the Large Advents, I think you might be a victim of room acoustics. Yes, Large Advents have a touch of roughness in the lower midrange, likely an issue with the crossover. This midrange roughness can range from barely noticeable to very irritating. It depends on the setup, primarily the listening room itself, but also, how the speakers are placed. For example, rooms that are more than twice as long as they are wide are problematic, due to standing wave phenomena. Especially bad is if they contain hardwood floors and/or highly reflective wall surfaces. Most people put LAs on the floor because despite being called "bookshelf" speakers, they are too big and heavy for most peoples' bookshelves. While this solution is easy and intuitive, LAs don't sound their best when set up that way. They sound best in my opinion on sturdy spiked stands 12"-15" high, backs away from the wall, and well away from corners. In room-acoustics-speak, they do best more or less in a "free field" environment, not acoustically coupled to floors, walls, etc.

As for the AR-3A's, people who frequently listened to live symphony orchestra concerts, especially people who PLAYED in symphony orchestras for their living, preferred the AR-3A over ANYTHING ELSE then on the market. They weren't perfect either, mind you, but with massed strings, nothing else came even close. No less a personage than Herbert von Karajan, then music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, not only owned them, he actually shilled for AR (endorsing products was something Herr Maestro had never done before, and never did again), promoting their products in general and the AR-3A in particular. What's more, during those years - late 60's, early 70's, at Maestro Karajan's insistence, all of his recordings on Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft with the Berlin Philharmonic went through final mix-down with AR-3As as their reference studio monitors. The old maestro ran the Berlin Philharmonic as a tyrant, often suspected and even accused of being an unrepentant Nazi, but his hallmark was his incredible pair of ears and his meticulous attention to details of balance and timbre. That this particular man was so bullish on the AR-3A confirms to my satisfaction that these speakers - despite what some modern critics say - were - and still are - loved and respected for good reason!

My larger point is that comparing the Large Advents - a fine, even incredible speaker for its cost - with the AR-3A, one of the finest speakers of the era bar none, and the flagship of the "New England School" of American loudspeaker design, is really quite unfair.

The LA and 3A were similar in size, both built by classic mid-century New England speaker companies, but the AR-3A was more than twice the price! The Large Advent was targeting people like me at the time - people who loved and coveted the AR-3As but couldn't afford them! Keep in mind that in today's dollars, the AR-3As would have sold for over two grand - EACH! In concrete terms, the price of a pair of new AR-3As was enough to have purchased my first decent used car - a clean and sweet-running 8-year-old 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 coupe - AND come home with enough change to buy a month's groceries - or a month's rent - or enough gasoline to run my V8-powered Ford for FOUR TO FIVE MONTHS!

Congrats on your AR-3As. What was then called the "New England Sound" is now out of fashion. People like "up-front" sounding speakers, featuring laser-etched high-frequency detail and/or thunderous bowel-loosening bass. I compare modern tastes in audio reproduction to much of modern photography. A lot of today's photographs are sharper than real, and with a more restricted, less subtle, more "primary" and more saturated color palette than exists in the real world. Many of the speakers lionized by high-end audio publications - despite their "accuracy" and x-ray transparency - just don't allow me to put on a first-rate orchestral recording, close my eyes, and suspend disbelief. AR-3A's, up to their new out-of-the-box best, supported by appropriately fine quality electronics and media source components, were truly among the few speakers - in all of audio history IMO - that really could transport you.

Saying that the Large Advent was excellent value for money is not to damn it with faint praise. Faint indeed! The Large Advent was arguably 80% of the AR-3A, but at an insane bargain price. Advent's success engineering and building in that much quality at that price point made them the heroes of discriminating - but poor - audiophiles everywhere.

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But you need to read the info that came out on the ads when the large advents did that Henry Kloss advised us to compare the speakers with the best available and I did and found them to come short. I didn;t damn them just did what he said and you agreed that they didn;t quite come up to the 3as.

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But you need to read the info that came out on the ads when the large advents did that Henry Kloss advised us to compare the speakers with the best available and I did and found them to come short. I didn;t damn them just did what he said and you agreed that they didn;t quite come up to the 3as.

Yes, I remember the ads, too. But, these ads were floating around when I was a skinny, ebullient, quick-witted and clear-eyed undergraduate university student and greenhorn professional orchestral bass trombonist with a surplus of hair and beard growth as well as optimism for the world and my future in it. Now, I am a 60-year-old, graying, balding (though still with a surplus of beard growth), paunchy, slow-moving, slow-thinking, mole-eyed, world-battered, cynical and misanthropic son of a bitch with far more past to both regret bitterly and savor nostalgically than future to feel optimistic about.

So, I did what most people do whose "RAM chips" are becoming intermittent and corrupted... I looked it up!! Fortunately, I didn't have to look far; I found those old Advent ads in www.classicspeakers.net's library!

One of the early ads was titled "The Advent Loudspeaker," so-called because it really was "THE" Advent loudspeaker. There were no other Advent speakers, this one was IT! Above the banner font was a parenthesis, "(You Can Spend Two or Three or Four Times Its Price And Not Do Better)." In the ad copy below the title, there is a key operative talking point:

"
It's designed to compete in every audible respect with the most expensive speakers available, at a fraction - often a very small fraction - of their cost.
"

Concerning the supra-title parenthesis, if you parse the language, you notice that it does not say that The Advent Loudspeaker is better than, or even as good as, a speaker costing up to four times as much. It says that you can spend a whole crap-load of money and still get a product that is not any better for you having spent it. All that means is that then, there were a lot of over-hyped, overpriced speaker products on the market, the "Rolex watches" of the audio world. Clearly, some things never change. The other thing to notice is that this phrase really says nothing at all about The Advent Loudspeaker.

In the ad copy, note that it says, "It's designed to compete... with the most expensive speakers available..." It does NOT say, The Advent Loudspeaker is "better than" or even "as good as" the most expensive available. Essentially, they were claiming that their product could be put in a listening room with the most expensive speakers available and people wouldn't laugh it out of the room. Indeed, on listening, many of those people might start to ask themselves how the others can justify being SO MUCH more expensive. In fact, The Advent Loudspeaker was good enough that many people didn't just ask themselves, they asked other people - out loud - even in print - how the others justified being so much more expensive.

I caught a whiff of an implication that you feel Advent's product fell short of its advertising claims. My position is that it certainly did NOT. It merely fell a bit short of what you apparently inferred from their advertising claims, and what you inferred may be more than what Advent actually said. I mean no offense... I'm just sayin'...

Bottom lines...

  • I STILL think the AR-3a represented the zenith of loudspeaker development from the classic New England school.
  • I STILL fervently defend and praise Advent for building excellent products in that tradition that were affordable for us - as we now call ourselves - 99-percenters.
  • I STILL think there may be something not right about your pair of Advents. Upon re-reading your original posting, you seem to be describing Large Advents that flat-out sound BAD! They may not sound quite as wonderful as AR-3a's, but Large Advents that are operating at specification NEVER sound outright bad.

I bid you peace and good wishes as I sit in the corner of my living room, blubbering inconsolably - tears, mucus and spittle collecting and matting in my graying beard - as I envy you your AR-3a's - disconsolate in the knowledge that my paltry powers of persuasion will NEVER be equal to convincing my wife that $750-$1,500 for a good-to-excellent pair of restored AR-3a's of my own would be money well spent. <SOB!!>

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Do like I do and get an extra job and tell wife that his is my mad money. When I get upset that she doesn;t want to to spend money I go ahead and buy what I can afford. Even then she bitches too much money spent. I just tell her to get a second job and buy the furniture she wants. Never a answer.

I have a beautiful pair of restored 3as in my man cave as the rest of the house is her womans cave.

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  • 10 months later...

I realize that this is an old thread but I very much enjoyed reading your opinions on the LAs compared to the AR3As. I have the LAs (4 pair) but hesitate to spend the money on a pair of 3As in good condition much less the money it would take to get a pair of 3As in properly restored condition. I do have a pair of AR11s that are very similar and a pair of AR5s that are the same except for the size of the woofers. The thickness of the material used in making the 3As boxes probably had some effect on the sound and that may cause the AR5s and 11s to sound very different. I hope to have the 5s and 11s completed soon so I can compare them with my LAs. I'm 76 and my heart is acting as if it's much older so I need to work quickly. :D

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  • 4 weeks later...

Bonejob,

Your assessment is spot on.

I have both the Ar3a's and the Advents (the original with the woofer at the bottom (where it belongs)).

However, the room in which I have my setup has not been treated acoustically.

Somewhere out there is a pair of Advents being driven by an amp and preamp that are in sync with them. And they are in a room with the proper acoustic treatment. I also know that these same Advents blow away my AR3a's as I currently have them set up in my home.

It's not cheap, it's a lot of work and it requires an enormous amount of research to acoustically treat a room.

If your listening room is your living room, the WAF is extremely low. And that's if your allowed!

Bottom line - I "do" have the AR3a's and I often wonder how they would sound in the "right" room.

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As a response to my own comment above:

Just recently I purchased a CD player based on extensive research that I had done. Evidently, there is a difference in CD players. Anyway, this is a Magnavox CDB-560. An oldie but goodie.

So last night (4/3/13), I popped in what I feel is one of my best CDs (CHANDOS 10174 X - Delius and Vaughn Williams), got into the sweetest spot I could find on my couch and had a listen.

The AR3a's put me right in the center of the hall, maybe 15 rows back. I believe that's what they were designed to do.

The orchestral sound was full and enveloping, all the instruments clearly separated with astounding bass to boot. It was wonderful!

I plan on building bass traps soon and I'll see (or hear) what that buys me. Baby steps.

Also, I'll swap out the AR3a's for the Advents in the near future. After all, this is an Advent thread. But the meantime, I have some pretty special speakers in the AR3a's and I don't know how much better I can do. But I'll try!

The challenge of achieving this quality of sound on a modest budget is extremely rewarding. And fun.

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  • 3 weeks later...

My wife passed away 18yrs. back. Married 36 years and never had a quibble over buying anything I wanted. I had to be careful about talking about something I wanted but was hesitant about buying or one day I'd come home and she would have it gift wrapped laying on the bed. She bought our first CD player, my first auto focus camera and a Pioneer SX1010 receiver that I drooled over. I've gotten into vintage equipment since she's been gone but I'm sure she'd approve of everything I have except for converting the guest bedroom into storage for all my stuff. :):)

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