sound practices reading club /51

Stubborn, right? Don’t want to settle for a modest, classic speaker—as Herb Reichert recommended last week—do you? Really lusting after some horns? Well, I know what that feels like. To satisfy that, there is going to be some more refined-choices speaker articles—all of them horny.

Today we are reading Voice of the Theatre Chez Nous by John Stronczer, from sound practices issue 11. Over the course of 9 pages (!), John recounts his first encounter with Altec VOTT A5s at the NRdS listening room and his reasons for falling in love with them. This is followed by descriptions of Jean Hiraga’s system; the logic of A5 systems; Altec 515 and 288 drivers, 1505 horns and 825/828 cabinets. Then it is time for the Hiraga crossover, some time alignment and final impressions. There is an addendum which involves an AES article and the Quad electrostatic, followed by 5 pages of Altec literature.

Whew.

teaser quote: ‘My wife has been convinced to live with ours, especially after hearing what they do for music, and a promise from me to clean up the finish a bit. It does take up space, to be sure, but it makes more and better music than any other system I have heard.’

my take
First, if you do take the hell-raiser route of messing with horns, then I recommend you also get a classic speaker + classic amp system in the same house. This system will play music during all those years that you will be scheming and messing.

It just happens to be that today’s article is the multicell special. They have been mentioned in passing in the speaker articles we have read: Herb Reichert used the Altec 1005, Don Garber the 805, but that’s about it. With this article multicell horns get their 15 minutes of fame. Now we can look up in that Altec literature what those numbers mean.

In contrast the (mid-)bass cabinet, the 825/828, has already been featured all over the place. No wonder, because it provided the low end for both the Altec A5 and A7 systems. It takes just one look at the top of page 15, to realise that it is the only sane choice from the Altec range—when one wants at least some horn-loading below 500Hz.

Checking the tables on pages 10 and 15 (at the bottom), we see that the A5 system consisted of a 825 cab with a 1505, 1005, or 805 multicell horn; the A7 of the same 825 with a 511 or 811 radial horn. These default product configurations explain what ultra-fi enthusiasts could ‘find’ and recycle—in those days. Nowadays your area of residence and mine have been combed by men-with-white-vans and all of these systems have dissolved into parts that you’ll find on eBay.

Up to now I have been contrasting our article with sprc speaker articles, but in a back-to-the-future way, we have seen all of this—A5, Hiraga x-over—before: in the Berman system in SP issue 13. You can see there that they do not look that intimidating next to a tall guy. I quote from that article: ‘[…] the speakers really “clicked in” for home music listening with the new x-overs.’

Which brings me to why this article runs in the ‘refined choices’ category, instead of ‘first stabs’: Jean Hiraga and his x-over. He did the difficult job of integrating; the 1505 horn with the 825 cab and both of them into a domestic environment. I am sure that having seen and heard innumerable systems (by 1995), both kick-ass horns and chichi high-end, helped him to make tasteful choices while domesticating the A5.

Last december at ETF 2014, Jean Hiraga brought some speakers, to be hooked up to 300 kilo of amplifier that a delegation from Japan was bringing. Which speakers? The Altec A5, complete with wings and extra tweeters (one forward, one 45° back-’n’-out-wards).

Thus 20 years down the line, from when this article was published, I think it is fair to say that the Altec A5 with Hiraga x-over is a classic speaker. As long as your room is big enough—in proportion to the speaker—then you can set up and enjoy.

practical note: John writes ‘phase align’ but means time align. Filters do phase, physical offset and delay do time. You can read about my thoughts on time alignment and my cookbook.

Speaking of, the photo on page 7 shows how the trouble when time-aligning a horn system purely by physical offset: the tweeter disappears behind the bigger horn(s). It is predictable that the tweeter ends up at the back, in line with the magnets of the other drivers—not exactly, but in that ballpark. As shown here, this means that the tweeter, which is suppose to deliver wide dispersion of the highs, is working through a letterbox between the two other horns, firing most of its energy into them.

Watch out with radically moving any driver left/right or up/down to give the tweeter a nice, unobstructed area to fire through—say, similar to the front area of the 1505. By pulling the drivers apart you are making the listening area, where everything coincides, exceedingly small.

ps: note the cameo appearances from the classic Spendor SP1/2 and Quad ESL, the solid base experimenters use to start their wilder explorations from.

Now go and read the article, see you next week.