AR-3a's and Rubinstein

vinylviola

Well-Known Member
I picked up a minty pair of AR-3a's several months ago, and for one reason or another, they ended up in the storage with the rest of my out-of-circulation gear.

I'm getting ready for a move and so decided it was time to part with anything that wasn't something I wasn't going to listen every day, which meant my daily axes were going to be a pair of Polk SDA 2B's.

In getting them ready to move along I was playing through various source material and happened to hook up a CD player that I'm selling to a CL buyer tomorrow. I'd forgotten I left a disc in the machine, so when I fired it up, Beethoven's 'Waldstein' piano sonata played by Arthur Rubinstein came through the AR3a's.


Uh-oh.:drool:

In the course of all of the other source material I was using the AR-3a's had been underwhelming in the arena of reproducing many of the production colors that many of my favorite bands like to use. The Polk SDA's show these off beautifully, but the AR's just seemed...plain. I was all prepared to move 'em along.

Then I sat down and listened to the piano reproduction. I know they did their famed demonstration/experiment concerts with the Fine Arts Quartet to demonstrate their life-like reproduction, but I guess I'd presumed that the capabilities of these speakers had been copied in subsequent generations of speaker design and was now old news.

I've NEVER heard such accurate reproduction of my classical records as from the AR-3a's. I'm a classical musician, and listening to these is the closest I've actually felt to being on stage with the actual musicians themselves. I can actually listen to Rubinstein's pedaling, how he's articulating his left hand differently from his left... it's been incredible.
I think my favorite part is how effortless and how deep the low register comes out on the piano. With rock recordings the bass was good, punchy, but not necessarily musical. Here its true purpose is really being showcased.

Now it's 2 AM and I'm still no closer to going to bed than I was when this started.

I need to see how it handles string chamber music. And then the symphonic stuff...brass instruments? What about choral? Or opera...I have a disc of greatest hits-type arias that would find out if these babies would make my ears bleed on the soprano's high Es...

I sent an offer to a friend to see if he wanted the 3a's before I posted on CL, but I don't think he's going to get them after all. I may just have to make room in my shoebox apartment for these guys.

The only technical issue is a dirty pot on one tweeter - it's fighting to be heard, but a good cleaning is all it needs, I think.

Anyways, back to it...:music:
 
Something like that happens to me most every time I listen to my AR 3as! I don't see how anyone could possibly part with them.
 
It is said that the AR3a is the best of the ar series.I have experienced something similar involving a set of Electro Voice Leytons(early 60's).My primary music is 70's rock and the EVs did not seem to reproduce it that well.Everything just sounded dull and flat.Well I put on "a quarter to blue" a trip into the wee small hours of the morning jazz and this is where those EV's work is cut out for them.Horns and vocals appear to be their specialty.It is said that a good speaker should reproduce everything well.Maybe their are but I haven't found it yet( I guess I need to look elsewhere other than a thrift)although my Bozak 302a seem to do a pretty good job at it.I am always on the lookout for a set of ARs and know that to me they are a specialty speaker and do some thing well and others extremely well as you have found out.Enjoy.
 
I love my AR 3a's too. It's amazing what Vilchur (and Kloss on the 3's) did with these and before all the electonics available for speaker design today. They measured their design with their ears :yes:

I also think we sometimes get the setup "right". Cables, source, placement, etc. And all of a sudden there's magic :music:

I'm having that experience now with a pair of recapped JBL L36's fed by Fisher tube amp. I think it was my cable selection that made the noticable difference and I've not been a huge cable proponent before. Just used some good Audioquest where I have some old cheapies and viola! Unbelievably rich sound.

There's a guy selling Ohmite 15 OHM replacement pots on eBay in lots of 10. Might be worth making him an offer and never having to worry about those pots again. :D
 
It's amazing what Vilchur (and Kloss on the 3's) did with these and before all the electonics available for speaker design today. They measured their design with their ears :yes:
Let's pretend.... :tongue:

The role of measurements in AR design is well documented. Villchur was first and foremost a scientist. Here's what he said about it just four years ago:

Lander: However long gone you may be from AR, you maintain strong views about hi-fi. In fact, you initially balked at doing this interview because you feel that many aspects of high-end audio, such as expensive cables and equipment break-in, are meaningless.

Villchur: The concluding paragraph of a talk I once gave at an Acoustical Society meeting sums that up. I'll read you part of it: "Scientific method allows investigators to form hypotheses in any way they please: out of a cold assembly of facts, intuition, or a drunken stupor....Once a hypothesis is proposed, however, it must be demonstrated rigorously. The audio discipline needs to be brought back to the world of reason."

Lander: Is there room in that world for subjectivity?

Villchur: Objective measurements in audio are primary, but they're useless unless they've been subjectively validated as predictors of musical accuracy. The validation method we used at Acoustic Research was the live-vs-recorded, or simulated live-vs-recorded, comparison. The standard I use today is set by our Woodstock chamber music concerts.

http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/105villchur/index.html
 
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The role of measurements in AR design is well documented. Villchur was first and foremost a scientist. Here's what he said about it just four years ago:

And it was not a particularly uncommon view among designers. Recall, for example, the famous quote from H.H. Scott's Daniel von Recklinghausen:

"If it measures good and sounds bad, -- it is bad. If it sounds good and measures bad, -- you've measured the wrong thing."

The real question was, and still is, are all the various measurements we see for audio gear, particularly for transducers like speakers and phono cartridges, really telling us anything useful about how the products will really sound?
 
The real question was, and still is, are all the various measurements we see for audio gear, particularly for transducers like speakers and phono cartridges, really telling us anything useful about how the products will really sound?
From 7.1.1 Correlations between Subjective and Objective Domains here:

http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20090314/13686.pdf

Toole said:
To overcome this, all loudspeakers must be evaluated in
one continuous test, with each product being compared to
every other product. When this was done with a group of
13 bookshelf loudspeakers, the correlation improved to
0.995—near perfection. The fact that the loudspeakers being
compared were of similar physical configuration was
an advantage, but that does not detract from the importance
of the result. It is clear that there is a way to translate
anechoic data from loudspeakers into very reasonable predictions
of subjective ratings as they occur in a normal
listening room.
 
Sorry Zilch, I think what you've quoted from Vilchur reaffirms my originial comment. Note he says validation is in how live versus recorded sounds. :yes:

And your other quote talks about "predicting" subjective preferences.

I'm not saying measurements don't have their place. What I am suggesting is you can't measure quality of sound with equipment better that with your human ears. It's nice to have equipment measurements for direction or to verify either quality or a problem. But ultimately it's how it sounds to our real measuring equipment - our human and imperfect ears. Replicate the human ear in a piece of equipment and you may have an improved measuring device. But why bother?

And I'm convinced you can't completely measure what sounds right to people's ears and therefore quality. Kinda the opposite of your monnicker - More sound and less data wank! :D
 
Listening to some AR 2ax as I write this.

Figures lie and liars figure. Here's a story told by Rudy Bozak :

Bozak joined C. G. Conn in 1944 to help them develop an electronic organ. While in Elkhart, Indiana, he noticed that the human sense of hearing was unpredictable at best. Years later, Bozak recounted this story about the Conn electronic organ project: "The general sales manager, who was a pianist and played organ, sat down and played the thing and said it was great, just what we were looking for. A week later he was invited back into the laboratory and sat down and played the instrument again. He didn’t play ten or fifteen bars when he said, This goddamn thing doesn’t sound right. What did you guys do to it?’ We said we hadn’t done anything. Well, he didn’t believe us. ‘You did something to it. You messed it up here,’ he said. ‘Restore it back to the way you had it.’ So what we did was let the damn instrument sit there for another week, and he comes back and plays it again. ‘Now this is the way it should be,’ he says."[2]
 
And I'm convinced you can't completely measure what sounds right to people's ears and therefore quality. Kinda the opposite of your monnicker - More sound and less data wank! :D
My objection is to the revisionist perspective that Villchur et al. designed with their ears, which is clearly not the case, much as subjectivists would like it to be otherwise, and we've certainly gotten better at what they actually DID do over the last 50 years.

Yesterday, it was AR, but today it's JBL, according to your measurement system, and tomorrow, something else, very likely. All great good fun, of course, but I'm just not seeing very much in the way of reliable traction here. ;)

Bozak joined C. G. Conn in 1944 to help them develop an electronic organ. While in Elkhart, Indiana, he noticed that the human sense of hearing was unpredictable at best.
Yup, and notoriously so, rendering it all but useless for the purpose of ascertaining what is better, and what not so good, except statistically, under controlled conditions.

Tell me what you like, and that's descriptive, perhaps definitive, of you, and nothing else. We also know that's subject to change, as soon as the next time you listen, even.... :yes:
 
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Regardless where this thread ends up and my feelings I have learned a TON from Zilches posts and measurements. Thanks Zilch.
 
Yesterday, it was AR, but today it's JBL, according to your measurement system, and tomorrow, something else, very likely. All great good fun, of course, but I'm just not seeing very much in the way of reliable traction here. ;)

Zilch,

You of all people shouldn't point fingers about people liking new/different speakers. I have all the traction I need. I listen to what sounds good. With AR's that will be with my SS gear. With JBL tubes. And if I can ever figure it out it may be my AR 3a's with tubes on top and SS on the bottom end.

I've learned a lot from your measurements too. But I'm never going to choose a pair of speakers based on measurements. If that were the way most folks chose speakers half the audio companies wouldn't be in business. And we certainly wouldn't be buying this old vintage gear that sounds better than it measures.

I'm reminded of Larry the Cable Guy - "you can't fix stupid!" Well I say you can't measure quality sound reproduction - at least not completely. We either don't have the right equipment, are measureing the wrong thing - or it just can't be done.
 
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You of all people shouldn't point fingers about people liking new/different speakers. I have all the traction I need.
I'm not pointing fingers or making fun of anything, rather, merely citing the variability and changeability of subjective opinion -- yours, mine and everyone else's. It's totally unreliable as a metric.

One thing apparent in the AK speaker experience is that for every "favorite" there are also those who'll step forward to say they quite suck; the reason is that we're not talking speaker facts here, rather, personal subjective opinions, interesting in and of themselves, perhaps, but certainly not definitive, and probably not even descriptive.

The facts are elsewhere, in the objective data, and this is well established:

1) That, given the opportunity and choice, under controlled conditions, listeners prefer a particular set of loudspeaker sonic characteristics, and,

2) There is a high correllation between objective measurements and those listener preferences.... :yes:
 
And I'm convinced you can't completely measure what sounds right to people's ears and therefore quality.

I don't think it's peoples' ears, but their brains. Even if you're certain you can devise measurements that will predict how something will sound, predicting whether a given individual is going to like that sound is another matter.
 
But the highest corrrelation is what people hear and like :D

It's like the original poster experienced. He knows what a concert piano should sound like. And so when the AR 3a's after detection by his imperfect ears and all the psycho acoustis stuff that's over my head - his mind says - yeah that's it.

From what I've read Vilchur and Kloss ultimately, after taking objective measurement as far as they could, used what they heard to design the original AR speakers.
 
Shacky - you cannot profitably argue this point.
The objectivist v. subjectivist discussion is the primary purpose behind Zilch's presence on the internet. "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."
In the end, your opinion and preferences will not be valid, as set out by many scientific journals. You will be shocked, and will protest, but in the end you must realize that you don't actually like what you like.
Then all will be made clear, when it is pointed out that the real point to this is that measurements are needed to have unbiased, uncolored descriptions, a "universal language" so to speak, when discussing the sound of speakers. Nevermind the fact that the purpose is the reproduction of music.
Just disengage and go enjoy something.
 
Never tell an Irishman that he can't argue a point. :no:

Opinions and preferences are exactly why different folks listen to different speakers.
 
Never tell an Irishman that he can't argue a point. :no:
Lol. Sorry, guess I kind of project my German practicality on others. OTOH, I'm a lawyer so I enjoy a logical argument as much as the next bottom feeder...

Opinions and preferences are exactly why different folks listen to different speakers.
And music. Which comes from those speakers.
I'm not saying I disagree with you. Just that playing handball against a curtain might be more productive.:D
 
Ok - I've had several folks send me articles about Vilchur and Kloss and their scientific approach to speaker building.

So I guess I'll back off on suggesting they designed with their ears.

I just loose interest in a lot of numbers and graphs. I don't buy speakers based on specs. I buy them or better refurb and keep the ones that sound good to me.

And our original poster was raving about how right his AR 3a's sounded - and with an instrument he is intimately familiar with.

Vilchur and Kloss ultimately were making speakers that to the human ear sounded as close as possible (probably closer than anything to that date) to the live performance. That was there validation. And their famous live/recording tests.

If Zilch or someone can meaure AR 3a's and explain why they sound so good - that will be interesting.
 
The 'master' of wank

Robert Harley is the current editor of The Absolute Sound Mag. and writer at Stereophile for many years previously. He's been an audio critic in the industry for years and at this point seems to be a strong supporter of subjective assessment of audio gear (see attachment for his treatise on the subject).
In fact he's become quite adept (so he claims) at assessing audio amps, preamps, CD players - all those intermetiate items in the audio chain that process electrons but don't convert them into mechanical energy. Now that's got to be pretty difficult, and yet he has quite a following.
I challenged him a bit on this point on his website forum after reading the attachment. His response was interesting.
http://www.avguide.com/forums/objectivism-vs-subjectivism-not-always-conflict

For what it's worth.
 

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