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AR2ax find

BmWr75

BmWr75

Top octave? pfffffftttttt
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Picked these up yesterday from a local fellow for $40. He said they belonged to his father-in-law. Will be my first AR restoration project. Got to figure out how to get the grills off first without damaging them or the cabinets. Hooked them up and can hear the woofers playing, but don't think the midrange or tweeter is playing on either of them. Anyone have a picture of the crossovers in these speakers and list of capacitors?
 
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The ones I had velcro to keep the grills on. I just gently pried them off with a butter knife and a rag to protect the cab. Sorry no x-over info for you.
 
OP-- AR2ax's are just about the most written about speaker on AK. do a search, and you will find about 3 days worth of reading, including x-over redo's, cab work, complete rehabs, etc...
 
BmWr75 said:
Picked these up yesterday from a local fellow for $40. He said they belonged to his father-in-law. Will be my first AR restoration project. Got to figure out how to get the grills off first without damaging them or the cabinets. Hooked them up and can hear the woofers playing, but don't think the midrange or tweeter is playing on either of them. Anyone have a picture of the crossovers in these speakers and list of capacitors?
Click to expand...

If the grills have never been off before, they'll be stapled and/or glued in place. Usually a fairly wide putty knife and patience are the best tools. The midrange and tweeter are probably fine, 99% of the time it's the level controls that are the problem. Do some searches on AR speakers here, and you'll find a mountain of restoration info.

They're a great little speaker, once you've gotten them up and running I think you'll like them.
 
BmWr75 said:
Got to figure out how to get the grills off first without damaging them or the cabinets.
Click to expand...
I've had success by unscrewing the brass badge, inserting and screwing in an eyehook (not too far, though....you DON'T want to screw into the baffleboard. Then pulli the grill frame outwards gently.......with a little effort it should pull away. Once the corner comes free, you can carefully work your way around the entire frame with a putty knife.
Good luck....they are definitely worth the effort. :D
 
It might be a very simple fix - terminals 2 and T should be connected together. If you connect your wire only to terminals 1 and 2, only the woofer operates. Actually, the labels on the back will tell you what to do. Of course, they also tell you to keep your grubby paws out of the innards of the speaker...clearly, they had no idea of who their eventual owners would be.

Otherwise, you may be running into problems with The Pots. Two pots (actually rheostats) control midrange and tweeter levels. Both have a well-deserved reputation for getting all kinds of crapped up. Fortunately, you can easily open them up and clean them. Unfortunately, many times they're just shot - for example the midrange pot often suffers from a burned-out electrical contact on the wiper arm of the pot. You can get new Ohmite 15 ohm replacement rheostats for a mere $21 - each. That'd be $84 for a set of four. It'd pay to get busy cleaning.

The Classic Speaker Pages has wiring diagrams for the AR-2ax, plus a manual on restoring the AR-3a, which is similar enough to the 2ax to be very useful information. And there's information on The Pots - refurbishment and replacement.

IMO, AR-2ax's are a real "I dunno" proposition. I think they can be massaged into a speaker that does very well on female vocals. It'd help a lot if I could have actual working mid/tweeter controls; as it is, the previous owner of my speakers put in a voltage divider network, set at the dead center of the pots' 16 ohm resistance.

I thought a replacement tweeter would help, but I ran into an interesting feature of these speakers - the mid/tweeter crossover point is pretty high, at 5 KHz. Since I am now officially into the "old fart" demographic, that's perilously near to the upper frequencies of my hearing, so it doesn't make a huge amount of difference.
 
shocley said:
...I thought a replacement tweeter would help, but I ran into an interesting feature of these speakers - the mid/tweeter crossover point is pretty high, at 5 KHz. Since I am now officially into the "old fart" demographic, that's perilously near to the upper frequencies of my hearing, so it doesn't make a huge amount of difference.
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Are you sure about that? Definitely many middle-aged and older people cannot hear 15Khz, but 5 Khz is not that high up, and should be quite audible. Of course, if you are in your eighties or nineties --the age when people traditionally but big ear-funnels against their ears and shouted, "Eh, speak up! I can't hear you!", then it's very possible you aren't hearing 5 Hz ...or much else, either!

I'd suggest you find one of those online hearing tests/audio frequency generators and give 5 KHz a listen. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that you still CAN hear it. My apologies (and sympathy!) if I'm wrong on this guess.
 
Arkay said:
Are you sure about that? Definitely many middle-aged and older people cannot hear 15Khz, but 5 Khz is not that high up, and should be quite audible. Of course, if you are in your eighties or nineties --the age when people traditionally but big ear-funnels against their ears and shouted, "Eh, speak up! I can't hear you!", then it's very possible you aren't hearing 5 Hz ...or much else, either!

I'd suggest you find one of those online hearing tests/audio frequency generators and give 5 KHz a listen. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that you still CAN hear it. My apologies (and sympathy!) if I'm wrong on this guess.
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Well, I might have been exaggerating a little bit, but to me, even 10 KHz seems like it's bordering on dog whistle territory.

I guess the main thing is that the replacement tweeters I installed in my AR's didn't make the hoped-for substantial difference. I do have enough hearing in the treble range left to perceive some shortcomings in my 2ax's. (In another old speaker system, the Fisher XP-7, a "new" original Advent tweeter did make such an improvement, and the AR-2ax has a lot better reputation than the XP-7).

This speaker system still hasn't "found itself", that is, it can reproduce some type of program material in a truly convincing fashion. Yet I see that so many people love the ARs' sound. But there's a lot more to try, as refurbishing AR-2ax's is something of a cottage industry. There are some glimmers of hope, too, as sometimes these speakers almost get it.

Not only that, but there's this intriguing econo-waveguide idea I see...
 
My 2ax is a 3-way speaker? :scratch2: I didn't know. That looked like a port with some metal mesh covering it.

If you use one of those on-line hearing range test programs, don't use computer speakers--or you may discover you can't hear doodley-squat. :nono:

My E-stat hybrids, OTOH, rise to 30kHz at 0.5% THD. M-4 says it allows DC to 200kHz. I'll try through that. I don't think true ribbons get up there. Only plasma. AU-X1 goes to 500kHz! :rolleyes:

:bat: :bat:
 
shocley said:
I guess the main thing is that the replacement tweeters I installed in my AR's didn't make the hoped-for substantial difference. I do have enough hearing in the treble range left to perceive some shortcomings in my 2ax's. (In another old speaker system, the Fisher XP-7, a "new" original Advent tweeter did make such an improvement, and the AR-2ax has a lot better reputation than the XP-7).

This speaker system still hasn't "found itself", that is, it can reproduce some type of program material in a truly convincing fashion. Yet I see that so many people love the ARs' sound. But there's a lot more to try, as refurbishing AR-2ax's is something of a cottage industry. There are some glimmers of hope, too, as sometimes these speakers almost get it.

Not only that, but there's this intriguing econo-waveguide idea I see...
Click to expand...

shocley, I have another idea for you ... bi-amping!

By itself, bi-amping will give you far, far more voicing control than the original pots. All you need is two solid state amps. One with at least 50 wpc for the woofers and then 10 wpc and up for the mids/tweeters.

This scheme will bring the mids back in balance with the woofers. Now, you'll still have the problem of the tweeters and the solution is to simply by-pass everything! You can, if you want leave 16 ohms across the tweeter, but for even more sound ... by-pass everything! Just have the tweeter connected to the cap.

This will put the tweeter out in front of the mid, which at present is behind the woofer by a lot. Once you get a 2nd amp (most of us have a basement full of low and mid power amps and this is a great way to recycle), we'll bring the mids back up to the level of the woofers. At the same time, those tweeters should ... wake up!

Regards,
Jerry
 
These early design AR 2-ways are cheerful overachievers. You should like them, they will be sonically related to those others you were shopping. Entry-level high-end performance with amazing low-end extension in a rather small package. My AV system is a solo pair of $12 AR-4x and they always suprize and please me. Their closed box AlNiCo magnets allow me to put them on the shelf on either side of the 32" CRT TV with no color disturbance and the low end balances perfectly in that position.
My test speakers are AR-6 on 4' stands against the wall, a bookshelf-reconfigured AR-4ax that is a sonic clone of that family. I've heard few small speakers that didn't sound small, these are amongst the few. You'll like 'em, they're keepers.
S.B.
 
Zilch said:
E'Wave fits, and they'll rock the house after that's completed.... :thmbsp:
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Oh really?!? Pass me the sawzall and stand back, I'm diving in on this one. :banana:

This seems to make much more sense to me than reworking the mids, tweets, and pots on these and I do believe the end result will be worth the expense and time.

//Smorgy
 
Smorgy said:
Oh really?!? Pass me the sawzall and stand back, I'm diving in on this one. :banana:
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Several members are working with AR2ax, but none have posted their completed projects yet. Be sure to take pics as you work through it so other members can see how you do the conversion.

I did AR2s, but used a different waveguide for the large vertical opening that originally held crossfired mids. That's not E'Wave, really, so it's in a different thread, but "Rock the house" is certainly apt. :thmbsp:

Here's the Bauhausler's tutorial on modding Advents. The process is similar for ARs:

http://audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=196614

Bauhausler said:
It's actually been a pleasure to convert these Advents, and far less actual work than I expected. The process is not trivial but far from challenging to someone with minimal technical skills and a little patience.
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