Altec 605A without a serial number?

[bowtie427ss]

An observation, my 605 has this reddish colored rubber on the surround, whereas others I've seen are just black. I saw another 605 with the 601xxx serial on eBay and it had the same reddish surround. Those 755 and 402 you posted have got it too. Is it possible that this 600xxx/601xxx designation could be related to that? Does the red surround signify anything? I am an Altec n00b, so this could totally be a dumb question. I find this stuff really interesting though!

The red surrounds are mostly a mystery to me, they came, and went. Nobody seems to know why.

[GM]

Don't know when Altec started, but I know the codes started in the early '20s and became an industry standard sometime after WWII and that all indications [massive dust accumulation and alleged factory build specs] at the time I acquired my blown 515Bs in late '68 is that their 391 date codes are 1956.

Frankly, due to significant WWII/military involvement I would have expected them to be an early adopter, but haven't paid any attention to date codes except to get build data from the factory on my 515s for custom ordering more, so only got this one alleged confirmation.

GM

[Basplin]

The red surrounds are mostly a mystery to me, they came, and went. Nobody seems to know why.

Perhaps it was just the stock of surrounds that Altec received for that era, maybe from a different distributor/maker?

[gdmoore28]

The red surrounds are mostly a mystery to me, they came, and went. Nobody seems to know why.

The red surrounds were quite common on University speakers. I wonder if their presence on the Altec's had anything to do with sourcing from the same vendors used by University since the two companies were commonly owned? Do the dates of the red-surround Altecs correspond to the era of common ownership? I did some searching on the subject and, naturally, there is no mention of the red surrounds, but there are assertions that the two companies operated completely independently. Of course, if the dates correspond, that does not mean that there could not have been mutual vendors.

Thinking about it a little further, mutual ownership of the two companies could have nothing to do with the red surrounds. Maybe their vendor(s?) just moved to the red color for a period. Or, it could be something as simple as the availability of red, and somebody at the both companies happened to like the way they looked!

Maybe some time in the future an internal memo will show up with a designer remarking how good the red surrounds looked and suggesting using them. Or, a memo from a bean-counter revealing that the red surrounds were cheaper and demanding that they be used! The possible explanations are endless.

GeeDeeEmm

[mah]

OT. This company has a red surround option in its catalogue - cloth 105. Interesting site to browse re cones.

Using the Speaker Cone Catalog - Loudspeaker Components, Lancaster WI

[GM]

Yeah, the only one I've seen was a local small town reconer used a rusty brown colored cloth surround to replace a damaged one on a neighbor's 803 that when clear doped was a dull red and when we gave the old girl [seemed past retirement age in my youth, though probably much younger in retrospect] a bit of a hard time about not using an OEM one as requested/agreed upon, she whipped out a package full of them that sure looked like an official Altec package with a very early logo, so in retrospect guessing they dated from maybe a pre-production or limited first production run of cloth surrounds to get feedback from reconers, end users and why they're so rare.

GM