I've had many Advents in woodgrain 'utility' cabinets, but never a real wood veneer pair. The sound is wonderful, as always, but they look
much betters and of much higher quality.
For those who wonder about the'original' Advents with the masonite ring around the woofers, they were made that way so that Henry Kloss' long travel woofer design could be realized inexpensively by the young company. A standard 10 inch woofer basket was too shallow, and the ring allowed a 10 inch woofer to be built with a 12 inch basket, which had sufficient depth. As soon as financially possible, Advent got it's own basket, the deep 10 incher. The masonite ring version sounds exactly the same to my ears, no better and no worse.
You'll notice a repair made to one of the woofer surrounds. The previous owner tore a dime sized hole, presumably with a screwdriver when installing the refoamed woofer. Since the refoaming was done (well) with contact cement (not recommend), it would have been difficult to remove the surround without damaging the cone. I glued a foam patch to the underside of the foam with my (recommended) Speaker Service Cement. It doesn't look pretty, but works perfectly, and sounds great. The Advents are pretty strange looking with grills off anyway, and I imagine owners of the real walnut veneer versions keep the grills on anyway.
4 comments:
I've got a pair of these as well as a pair of the utilities stacked (top pair inverted) driven by a Marantz 2252b. A classic early 70's setup.
People are amazed, especially in this world of Bose speakers and computer speakers and MP3s, of the sound a pair of old Advents and clean vinyl driven by good power puts out.
I've had lots of younger people tell me my NAD 7100/Advent/Denon DP47F/Grado cartridge table rig is the best-sounding stereo they have ever heard, and they don't even realize that, if anything, it is just scraping the bottom level of hi-fi.
The days of stereo are gone my friend. Long live the real stereos!
I lucked out and found a restored pair of these walnut Advents. Just beautiful, and the amount of sound they put out is incredible. I use a pretty little Akai 2200 amp to power them and a humble Technics SL-B1 belt drive tt.
I have a pair of Advent towers for the 70's, and stupid using them for about 15 yrs. when I last moved in 2003 I found a tear on the woofers and went on one for the replacements and speaker cement. Best investment and it worked perfectly so I got back the sounds I needed to hear. Seeing you article made me just want to thankyou for sharing. Now time to turn off the screen and pull out some LP's. Enjoy. Ed
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