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Showing posts with label Wabi Sabi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wabi Sabi. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2016

ADC 303AX Speakers

Acoustic Dynamics Corporation, ADC 303AX speakers came my way yesterday. This sealed 2-way speaker is right out of the early 70's and competed with the usual suspect including AR, KLH, Dynaco, Jensen and others.




 These speakers were built around CTS Alnico woofers and a CTS tweeter that also has a doped surround, before the infamous yellow phenolic ring tweeter.


The sound is very deep in the bass region smooth across the mid range and the highs were surprisingly crisp and clean with great dispersion.

Real walnut veneer cabinets are in good shape with all corners square, the usual Wabi Sabi* scratches are evident event after a light sanding and a coat on MinWax and I am fine with that. In fact I prefer Wabi Sabi to modern standards.



 These sound best through the Single Ended tube amp, in fact they sound fantastic, I am well surprised.

An old ad was found on the Audio Karma site from a discount store called Dixie's and you can see where they fell in the pack.


Generous gobs of the doping material have sufficiently cover the crossover that make the 6uf cap un accessible so I will just leave it as it is.

*Wabi Sabi: Japanese for the art of imperfection.



Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.

Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet—that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.