View Single Post
  #40   Report Post  
Sam Byrams
 
Posts: n/a
Default Dick Pierce on Altec, or MM?

duPont Corian is a cool and underutilized material as well. The
Japanese use it in some of their nifty, but too heavy to
cost-effectively import, cabs for classic coax drivers such as the
Altec 604, which I consider to be the "Marilyn Monroe of speakers".


What, you mean fat, slow and liable to die suddenly? :-)


No, glitzy, flashy but completely lacking in depth and substance.




The Altec is a real speaker with a 15" cone and some real build cost,
not like the stuff they sell at Madisound. We have this fantasy today
you can build a really first-rate speaker out of small drivers and
inexpensive crossovers, and while some of the "Speaker
Builder(magazine)mentality projects" sound pretty good for the cost,
and the high end stores sell very expensive versions of these same
products with little improvement, that doesn't make them the equal of
classic Altec and Lansing and a few other designs that cost a lot of
money to build.

The history of technology is that the new one almost always costs
less to build than the old one. If there is a total improvement, well
and fine, but more often it's a tradeoff-this for that. A 2004 car has
better engine management systems than a 1964 car, but the foundry work
on the block and heads was invariably better on the 1964 model. Most
of today's engines are not intended to be rebuilt and have very thin
castings.

Unlike ham radio, a dying hobby of cheapskates, audio people are all
too willing to spend money. You can buy $10,000 vacuum tube amps built
with the techniques used on $799 guitar amps, and not very much more
build cost. If you are going to spend all that money, there should be
some build cost-an Audio Research or c-j tube amp ought to be built as
well as a Vollum-era Tek scope. Are they? Are the output transformers
as good as UTC or Peerless? Look at the Thiel speakers, most of which
look inside as though they might have been built out of a Speaker
Builder article by a former pro home cabinetmaker or guitar
builder.(Because they could have been.) Then there's the Linn Sondek
turntable, almost as good as the last Merrill-upgraded AR's.

You are, however, entitled to your own opinion on MM. There's no
accounting for taste, but to me, her Rose Loomis in Niagara-you're
glad to see her strangled dead-Ava Gardner couldn't have done better.