JeffS

Hi Jim,

First off, what a great find!
I've followed AR-1 production watching auctions over the past few years. The AR-1 with serial # 5684 had a date stamp of Jan 1957 on the 755A. The AR-1 with serial #7538 had a date stamp of May 1957 on the 755A. I think it's reasonable to guess that if production stayed at or near that rate through the year, your speaker was produced in 1957.
You could also remove the grill and check the date stamp on the tweeter but from the data I've gathered it wasn't long after this that Altec stopped putting a date stamp on the 755A so your sample may not have it. If it was mine, I'd leave the grill on.

Jeff S

Thanks guys for the info.

Here's another one I'm thinking about. QSC RMX 1450 seems to have plenty of power for the buck.

Little better looking than the crowns in my opinion.

http://www.qscaudio....mps/rmx/rmx.htm

John

John,

I've been using a QSC RMX 1450 for a couple of years now to drive a pair of AR-9's. The fan on this amp runs continuously and is easily heard at low levels so you may want to consider an amp that switches the fan on when needed. I disconnected the fan in my unit and have never had a problem as most of the time I listen at low to moderate levels. There have been a couple of occasions where I have driven the 9's with very high output for ~ 30 minutes before the thermal protection kicks in (as it should).

Jeff

The photos and the Q&A show that this is a pair of AR-1W's in which AR apparently mislabeled one cabinet "AR-1" and the seller has just posted what the labels say.

The big question in my mind is how the seller could have listened to them for as long as he claims and thought they sounded good without noticing that there is no sound coming out of them above 1kHz.

I wondered the same thing.

I looked back at data from an eBay auction in January where sn 13195 had an AR-1 label on an AR-1W. The pictures show that the speaker in this auction is actually sn 12972 which is a spread of 223 units from the unit sold in January. It makes me wonder if a new hire was doing labeling and how many 1W's got out the door as AR-1's before the mistake was caught.