Moving on from the closed cabinet maker thread...Just got the second driver into a box yesterday. Gathering pix and TS measurements to write the 756B project up. I'm finding out some interesting things which I will report on as I gather material.
The Altec 756B is a unique PM cone driver that only appeared in only one Altec bookshelf system, the Melodist 700A --1955-1956 era. This is the 10" member of the Western Electric/Altec family that included the famous 755A and 728B. The 756B is an 8 ohm version of the Western Electric 756A, a 4 ohm driver.
The Melodist with a small ported cab and 3000A tweeter sounded pretty good, but I expected that the 10" driver could do more. First off, I would let it run full range and cut in a supertweeter as needed. It is rated 70-10000hz. Like the 728B, it is an ALMOST fullranger. To most modern ears, it might be too rolled off to listen to alone but the special quality of what is there is obvious to me.
Altec Melodists are getting extremely hard to find although it seems that the high prices of Altec are bringing a lot more rare stuff to market. The cost of such a project in ebay dollars would be prohibitive. I had one of the drivers in a Melodist 700A cabinet for years and saw a few come up for auction, but bids usually went way above my head. I have seen four or five pairs of Melodists in vintage shops in Seoul the last few years and I am sure the average price tag is well above $5000.
I pulled off the pair thanks to bowtie427ss who kept me in mind when he heard about a beat up Melodist with a replacement tweeter for sale and brokered the deal, submitted my offer, picked up the speaker and shipped me the driver.
Only had to give up one testicle for that one. Current ebay price is three testicles.
I gave Bowtie Tom a half-decent deal a few years ago on a pr of 1233s, sold via this board because I wanted them to go to the right home, and he hooked me up in return. Out of the blue...a pleasant surprise. He knew I needed that 756B and put my Altec addict jones/reesearch above export market profit.
This meant a lot to me because it proves that some of us still understand old-school fellowship and cooperation.
That's the way it should be among The Brotherhood of Altec Users.
The above-mentioned cabs that board member delwon built for me were the final piece of the puzzle. Another cool dude to the rescue! WE specified a sealed 2.5 cu ft slant front cabinet (like 618) for the 756B, so that is what I went with. Original design box for a WE/Altec gourmet speaker tasting experience.
I'm really excited about this because I used the 8" 755A and 12" 728B a lot but never heard the 10" before. 756s were always hard to find relative to the 8' and 12" versions. The 755A goes a lot higher and almost as low in a smaller cabinet and is more satisfying in a single driver music installation, so the WE 10" is a bit of a white elephant.
I am a big fan of late-40s/early-50s era Altec which includes the 700 series speaker designs inherited from WE and the 1400 series industrial amps, A-323/333, Peerless A100A triode amps, etc. The transition from pro audio to emergent postwar hifi is a subject of great interest to me. Altec is one outfit who bridged that gap and that venture led to a lot of the 50s-60s gear we know and love. The Altec line of the 1950 era was a instructive cross-section of the state-of-the-art technology at the birth of hi-fi and it got worse in many ways before it got better again.
My favorite Altec is gray.
I was a hardcore scavenger/researcher 25 years go when it was still possible to obtain rare Altec, WE, Lansing, etc at reasonable cost (with a lot of footwork and networking). Today, I can't afford or even find the stuff I love the most from market sources. It takes luck and friends to find this stuff now, both rare quantities in life. For me, this project is the story of the random events and personal connections that led to my success.
So at the end of a long road, last night I sat in a kitchen chair 10 feet out and listened to mono with a 10" and one DIY Peerless A100A amp for a few hours, drinking a few cold IPAs. Dock Boggs banjo, Little Esther Phillips. Man, I was in ALTEC Heaven.
The high tech speakers nerds from DIYaudio would surely think I am retarded... I prefer the politically correct term differently-abled!!
... I prefer the politically correct term differently-abled!!
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