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Opinions? I think they're nice looking, but what do you all say about the design/acoustics? Is the claim that they're for the 755A a stretch? I guess with the multiple ports and varying the degree of covering they could be tailored to any 8" driver.
ALTEC 755A STEPHENS 80FR Vintage Speaker Cabinets | eBay
I won't be bidding, but they did strike me as interesting.
Monitor's dying and can't see the pics with any detail, but due to the huge disparity between the two sets of T/S specs, especially Fs, I don't see how it could work well, but only one way to know for sure.
GM
You mean the famous Western Electric Altec Ling University 755A of ebay buzzword fame??
There obviously have nothing to do with 755As and I woudln't recommend them for that purpose, but I'd try them out if they were free and located in a dumpster I happened to pass on my way to buy beer.
I just started a blog and wrote up an entry on a real 755A cabinet, the Altec 618C, and also one on 755a varieties.
Check me out at Junkyard Jukebox
That's an excellent read Geekstar. :)
Actually those boxes are built a lot like the Melodist 700A cabs with an internal divider forming a long port. The 10" from the Melodist is ~60hz fs while the fs of the 755A is more like 95hz.
The seller is probably correct that they sound better with 755As than the famous and desirable in Asia WE wall cabinets, which are not well sealed and look to be under 1 cu.ft. There is a Korean seller on ebay who makes meticulous reproductions of this wall cab...why bother, I ask?
The 755A was designed for sealed box use, 2 cu.ft. Many have tried to make ported cabinets but in my experience any attempt to extend the LF ends up skewing the delicate balance that makes the speaker great. I heard one vintage slant box in Silbatone's stash in Korea that looks more like 4 cu.ft. and that works good, with perhaps a little more low end while keeping the top end crisp.
With the prices that 755As are going for, they are too expensive to dink around with inferior randomly tuned boxes. Do it right or sell em to Taiwan!;)
It just dawned on me that the 755E has specs that are somewhat closer to the Stephens 80FR, so wondering if the seller isn't getting his model suffix wrong.
GM
There were a lot of prefab "one size fits all" cabinets on the market in the 50s. Seems people would buy drivers and upgrade when they could, etc.
The problem is one size (port) does not fit all!!
I wish there were options for ready made cabs like this today. Most of the premade cabs are under 1 cu ft, which doesn't do people like me (many of us here) much good.