New Mission Argonaut photos.

A wild pair. Explanation to follow.

  From earlier postings, you know that they were black. I bought them from a shop that had two pairs. Both were in rough shape, and I excitedly bought what appeared (without checking serial numbers) to be the better of the bad. Because it was a vintage specialty audio shop, I assumed I was choosing between two matched pairs. What I didn't realize, because they were black and because I was anxious, was that I got the better speaker of each pair. This is why the side veneers are so different, and why I should've looked more carefully. Mission pairs have identical serial numbers, these don't. I worked very hard on the pair I'm enjoying so much (and they've been my go to speakers since I reinstalled the components).
  I could buy the other pair (which have some smashed corners), strip them, work even harder to restore them, and end up with two beautiful but very different matched pairs, or I can live with this wild pair. The grain of the front veneers is close, the front baffles look great and the drivers are almost perfect (one woofer has an abrasion on the front of the frame, that's all).  I'll let you know when I decide.
Update: The issue was decided for me. I went back to the second shop, and they were gone. I can stop wondering what to do!

New Mission 717s

 

  When I got my first pair of Mission 717s 2 years ago, the tweeters had been replaced with Advent 'fried  eggs'. Based on a few, unclear pictures I was able to find, I concluded that the correct tweeters would be the Seas replacements I used. I was wrong. It was an honest mistake, considering how closely the correct Polydax tweeters resemble Seas tweeters, especially in fuzzy photos.
  This pair came to me with all original drivers (which is how I realized I'd been wrong the first time). One tweeter was blown, but Frank at The Speaker Shop was able to find the correct replacement on a rectangular faceplate (as used in canadian Rega speakers), and mount it in the round faceplate of the blown one.
  When I got this pair, 12 of the 16 corners were smashed! I cast new corners in epoxy, using cardboard forms (smeared with Vaseline on the inside so the epoxy doesn't adhere), and touched them up with furniture putty crayons.
  They're lovely speakers, with the musical, punchy Mission sound I love so much.

Wow, what a great album.

This came out of left field for me. Kacey Musgraves is a wonderful songwriter.

Friday update

Both of my digital cameras are dead. I've experimented with a couple of new ones this week, one that left me very unsatisfied. I expect to be posting photos again soon.

Fresh, familiar,joyful, generous, fierce. I'm grateful for this album.

JBL 4406 photos.

These are great sounding little monitors from 1986 (from the line that included the 4412), with that big, punchy JBL sound. One of the cabinets is a bit swollen at the joints, but the cabinet itself is very solid.

I quickly rebuilt the chips on the right speaker baffle with epoxy, painted both baffles (after removing and checking out the components), used Restore-A-Finish & Feed-N-Wax on the cabinets. I think they look presentable enough to allow the elegance of JBLs understated industrial design to shine through. Here are the specs.

Mission Argonauts in progress.

Stripped, sanded, baffles repainted.
  In repainting the baffles, I made deliberate the decision to cover the ARGONAUT graphic...the MISSION logo appears 4 times on the front of each speaker, and as a professional graphic designer, I decided that there was more than enough branding.

Winter in Toronto.

Surprising JBL630s

That's what they call them, no space between the letters and numbers. These are from the early eighties, and sound quite nice, very JBL. They use two 6.5" woofers and a titanium laminate dome tweeter in a wide, narrow rear ported, very solid cabinet. They're sounding very punchy (but not the last word in detail) driven by the Mission Cyrus One.

I'm not only interested in Mission gear, but the last Argonauts are speakers I've been anxious to hear since I first heard the 770 Freedom 4 years ago.

Friday Update.

  I haven't done an update like this in a while.
  The SAE 3022 amp left this week. It's super serious blackness isn't for everybody, but it's a very good amplifier.
  I'm embarrassed to tell you that I blew a channel of the Mission Cyrus One amp about a month ago, my fault. The amp only accepts banana plugs for speaker connections, and my proper terminated cables were on loan. I used screw on bananas on another set of cables, and because the holes are so closely spaced, and because one tiny strand of wire wasn't securely screwed down, positive touched negative, and poof! I took the amp to Joe my new service guy, and discovered a lot about this particular example:
  1) I blew a perfectly good channel. The other side had been repaired at least 20 years earlier, with below spec parts, and I was lucky it functioned at all.
  2) There were a number of dried out capacitors. As nice as I thought the amp sounded (I didn't push it very hard), I haven't heard what it's really capable of.
  3) The heatsink and outputs belong on a Cyrus Two! This struck me as odd, until a friend with extensive audio industry experience filled me in. In production runs of this sort, it's not uncommon

to upgrade parts when the specified ones run out or are unavailable...no one is going to complain because their amp is better than specified, as mine, apparently, is. Joe has replaced all outputs and drivers with correct ones, and recapped a lot of the amp. It will be back soon, and it's going to be awesome! The Ortofon 445 speakers left this week as well. The person who took them away has owned a pair of 443s, their smaller brothers, since 1976, and was thrilled to have found them. On final listen, I think I described them well when I said that if you love Dynaco A-25s, you'll love these.

The Walkervilles.