Great Altec pictures

Ashly Audio Historic Parade - our back pages

Just bought an Ashly FET-2000M amplifier, and I wanted to know more about it so in the process I found this site, there are some cool Altec pictures there as well as some other cool things to look at.

Hey cool! I like the "Tower of Doom" especially. Looks like something Cal Weldon would put together. :p

Many of those guys still work for Ashly, great folks, great products, great service.

Bill F should be quite happy with his 2000M, i use one to drive the cones in my VOT boxes, a 1000M to drive the 802-8G's, and a recently factory serviced FET500 to drive the four Emilar EW15 woofers.

I'd like to order up a couple of Towers of Doom, please--hold the mayo. Rochester, NY is my home town. I have friends at Ashly (who've gotten me killer deals) and Brighton Sound as well...... Cool pics of the old Brighton Sound and Ashly.....

Hey that's cool! So you're right there, eh?

I like Ashly gear. Remember once swapping in an Ashly 32 band EQ for a Klark Teknik we had used in the rig for years. Wow! What a difference. Never wanted to go back to Klark. But it was on all the riders....

Nice stuff, Ashly.

On the stacks it looks like they are JBL drivers with some Altec Horns especially picture (Dave checking out the stacks) cool pics :)

I see that a few people like Ashly amplifiers and other gear. I disassembled the amplifier to clean it, and it looks like it is very well constructed, also it sounds great. I own several other commercial power amplifiers, and it is noticibly better sounding than some of the other amps that I own. So how reliable is this amp, one thing that concerns me is final transistors failing and sending DC into my speakers.

I also find it is interesting that the Tower Of Doom has those EV subs, they aren't all that old, or are they? I went to a concert last year and the sound company, Mason Sound, was using the same subs.

Over the years i've owned probably a dozen Ashly mosfet amplifiers, half of which saw hard regular road use for a couple years. I had one develop some hum which was tracked down to a loose TRS input connector. On two others, a channel in each of them went down between gigs. The problem was limited to FET-500's and was the result of the pounding these amps can receive being dragged in and out of 2 or 3 events a week.

Early FET's have clip on heat sinks on the driver transistors, they add a lot of leverage against the three legs of the transistor as there is no other support on these early models. Rigorous road use can cause the legs of the transistor to break. I'm also aware of an instance where a fella had one of those heat sinks come off and ultimately cause a fatal short in one channel that required factory service to repair. This is easily prevented in these older amps with just a couple small dabs of high temp rtv silicone to secure the heat sink to the board. Beyond that, in my experience these are as bulletproof as the best of them. Even the earliest literature touts their ability to withstand shorting of the outputs with no harm to the amplifier, and their ability to continue to function in brown out conditions with mains voltage sagging to as little as 20 volts.

You can move up to a series II or III FTX amplifier which has pretty much the same mosfet topology and sound quality with the addition of DC protection and turn on delay. I'm kind of a dinosaur and prefer my trusty old FET's, i have four of them including a FET 200 s/n 024, which i'd guess is kinda early.

Those EV MTL-4's came out around 86 or 87 i'm fairly sure, they're an awesome bass cabinet. But after having to move them a few times, a fella quickly falls out of love with them. If they look heavy, multiply that by a factor of two or three when you take hold of those handles.

I'd like to hear the tower of doom, as far as PA's go that had to be fairly "hifi" within it's coverage area.