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Review 2 of 2 Summary:
The original first product of Acoustic Research Corp in the late 50's. in Cambridge Mass. Designed by Edgar Villchur. Probably the most brilliant of all the engineers attempting to design smaller systems at the time. The first product was designed to be used with other manufacturers mid ranges and tweeters. I have heard many really good combinations with it. One of the more interesting ones was the combo using a Jantzen 4 panel electrostatic array as a high frequency unit. The only bad thing about this was that the Jantzen units started rolling off at around 800-1000 HZ and the AR-1W woofer started rolling off at around 600 HZ so a bit of a depression in the response curve was inevitable. Some models of the AR-1W had a series air core inductor to prevent anything above 600HZ from being fed to the woofer. In these versions it was debatable whether to by pass the inductor and get the slightly better response above 600 HZ and put up with the 2-3 db increase in output which would make the woofer play noticeably louder than the maximum that the Jantzen could do. I know what you are thnking this would be a perfect case for bi-amping. We did do that with dual Marantz 8b 353/35w power amps and Marantz 2 way electronic crossovers set at various frequencies between 600 and 1200 HZ. I still have the Marantz electronic Xovers that were used on one of these rigs way back in 1960. I think the Jantzens finally bit the dust when the power supplies failed due to poor capacitors and pickled solder joints (a serious long term EMF/dielectric type problem exist with powered electrostatic systems which trys to "pickle" and destroy the wiring and the solder joints). If you ever see any AR-1W's in an estate sale or garage sale don't pass them up. The suspensions are fabric and last forever so you won't ever find one all rotted out on the edges like modern systems. The woofer has an amazing 1.4 inch or so travel and produces really low distortion fundemetal frequecies down as low as 20 HZ about 6 db down. This thing will outperform the vast bulk of the subwoofers made today and runs just fine on a 60 watt amplifier. This same woofer was later used by AR in Villchur's wonderful classic original AR3 design of 1960-1 and later AR-3A versions with the better (smaller) tweeters.
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5 of 5
