Advent/1 Speakers

A recent trip to Vancouver yielded this pair of Advent/1 speakers from a local thrift store. I have had many Advents Speakers come my way including the Advent 5012, the New Large Advent, the Smaller Advent, the Baby Advent, the Advent 2002 and a pair of Advent 2W that were in my possession before the birth of this blog. Needless to say I have been a big fan of Advents along with EPI speakers as both are well designed 2 way acoustic suspension speakers.


This pair is a later version with the metal woofer basket but still with the fried egg tweeter. New foam surrounds were needed after 40 years. The cabinets are real wood veneer and I would rate them a 7 out of 10 at this point. These definitely needed some serious dust cleaning at this point.

 I really like  this set of Advent/1 speakers and they remind me of the New Large Advent I had but the cabinet is not as nice and the bass extension is close but not as deep as the New Large Advents, the rest of the speaker has the same acoustic signature as its' big brother.

I am currently running these off my Electrohome Push/Pull tube amp and I am really pleased with the detail of the sound plus the warm deep bass that these are known for. Although I am a big open baffle fan I will keep this pair of speakers around for a bit, these are easily my favorite 2 way 10 inch speaker that I have come across. Just to note that the EPI 100 are my favorite 2 way 8 inch speaker.

There is plenty of opinions on how these speakers won accolades in the 1970's as one of the best speakers for the money. I would tend to agree that these are great speakers and I am pleased as punch to come across a pair, Way to go Henry Kloss.

PSB 300 Speakers

It has been awhile since I posted and now that I got a small space to enjoy audio again a few things have come my way.

A 6.5 inch woofer and a Vifa T19 tweeter make up the drivers in this pair. The cabinet is a bass reflex to add a bit of bottom end ooomph.

These are definitely a nice compact bookshelf speaker that sound pretty neutral when driven with my push/pull tube amp. I will get a chance to hook them up to a Solid State amplifier soon and they should sound different, but with the tube amp they do everything nicely.

Open Baffle Isophon PH2132E

It has been a while since posting as life has had some significant changes for me in the past year. I had moved from Vancouver to Victoria and in the process downsized my speaker collection which unfortunately has been in storage.

Life is taking me on a different path at present and I do miss having my HiFi, I currently do not have the space to set everything up. I still have been scouring the internet and thrift stores but I find myself passing on lots of gear.

I do have a good collection of raw drivers and many projects in my head but these will wait until I have the space to return to them.

That being said I did sell my Isophon PH2132E with a pair of helper 12" alnico woofers to a HiFi enthusiast named Vlad.

He has since designed his open baffles with a bit of corroboration from me, I really like the way the project turned out.

I would have loved to hear these on my SET amp in my old man cave.

Celestion Ditton 33 Speakers

A mint pair of Celestion Ditton 33 speakers came across my path this week. These are very polite English 3 way speakers in beautiful Oak veneer.

Tannoy Oxford Gold Open Baffles for sale

I need to make room for more speaker creations and I am in the process of letting go of these speakers to make room for new ones.

These Tannoy Oxford Gold speakers are wonderful sounding and I think they sounded better out of the wooden cabinets than in.

I am asking $300.00 for the pair, the caps have been upgraded only and the veneer is a really nice Rosewood.

Once you have listened to an open baffle speaker it is hard to go back to a boxed speaker, if you are a true audio lover.

Email me bankofdave at gmail if interested.

Shipping will be at the purchasers expense.

Admiral Turbo Reflex Speakers

Here is something that flies under the radar for almost everyone but there is a dedicated following for this speakers, super ugly and cheaply made cabinets. It is what was inside and the design that counts.

These speakers use Coral 12RG06 full range 5.25 inch woofers and a tweeter crossed over with a 1uf capacitor. The boxes are a back horn loaded design with the chamber that goes back and forth across the internals three times producing outstanding bass. The sound from a tube amp defies how cheap and ugly these speakers seem to appear.

In that respect I have salvaged the drivers and kept one box to rebuild this design in decent boxes, I have enough Foster 4 inch drivers also to make a few pairs of folded horn loaded speakers.

 

Six months and plenty of change

This corner of the blogsphere has been silent as what was a great man space that often looked like this........

and had many great speakers, amps, beers and scotches of the years came to an end. Almost all the gear was sold off and what was left went into storage as a major shift in my life occurred.

Slowly this blog is re emerging with emphasis on building speakers, open baffles and back horn loaded using full range newer and vintage high efficiency speakers suitable to working best with tube amps,

I have moved from Vancouver to Victoria and have been scouting the area for decent gear but mostly come across the same stuff as before but at highly inflated second hand market prices, so I pass on a lot of it.

I have come across some gems though, stay tuned.