Front speakers

Acoustic Research AR94r

Within two weeks of sourcing the AR48’s, towards the end of February 2009, I happened upon an old ad for household goods which included the following simple phrase “…AR speakers…” The ad was almost 2 months old, so I was expecting the worst, but lo and behold, when I phoned it was still there, unfortunately in a not too pristine state according to the seller, Dennis. He again was just around the corner from my home, so I popped in there straight after work. Dennis was cleaning house, and the speakers sat against the wall in his garage, dusty, tied to each other with speaker wire and ready to go into the trash can! The base plates identified them as AR94r’s. The horrible all-enclosing socks looked quite pathetic with tufts of material sticking out or hanging down, torn in places and discolored all over. One speaker appeared to have been standing in a very damp area for a considerable period of time, because the compressed wood was literally crumbling away in the one corner. Major structural repairs on the cards – I was too scared to inspect the insides and simply offered him $20 to take it away.  

To add a bit of color to the background; these speakers' journey into Africa carried with them bit of additional American flavor; Dennis worked in the American Consulate in Cape Town during the 1980’s, and at one stage or the other the place underwent renovations, so he acquired the speakers at their garage sale.  He used them until the early 1990’s when he replaced his complete sound system and then stored the AR94’s in the garage.

From the materials used it was apparent that the AR94’s were meant to be seriously low budget speakers, falling in line with Teledyne’s focus on the low cost market sector which they advocated at the time. The cloth socks I’ve already described; the construction was a cheap version of compressed wood, so brittle that when you rubbed the surface, pieces of wood and what looked like straw (!) came away under my fingers. Scary. Researching their restoration yielded useful details as far as technical requirements goes, but the cosmetic upgrades hardly went beyond washing the socks!

Initially I contemplated resurfacing the outside with new wood, but the speakers were already huge, bulky and very heavy, so I had to look elsewhere. A new version of sock was also a very definite NO, because I simply hated the look. This was one restoration which was not going to end up true to the original, and eventually I settled for stabilizing and smoothing the existing “wood”.

First step was to plug the bigger holes with wood filler, then bind the complete surface with a black base paint, and finishing off with three heavy coats of clear marine varnish.

I threw out the thick plastic bases, and replaced them with the thinner tops, also plastic, but now painted in a complementary black and screwed to the speakers' bottoms to give a much more elegant look. Red paint on the outer edges of the drivers finished it off in a quite dramatic way with the “covers” off.

A final touch was the introduction of proper old style grills true to the classic and post-classic AR eras. It was fairly simple to cut out a frame in MDF, and then cover that in cloth recovered from the discarded speaker socks. Never being praised as the regular neighborhood handyman, I did feel proud with the final result, despite the knowledge that it would have looked even nicer in wood colour tones rather than the very stark black. But then again, the originals, socks and all, was black to begin with. With the original logos long gone, I ordered a beautiful replacement set in classical AR brass from Vintage-AR for $14 plus $3 for shipping.  In case anyone wondered, quotes for a locally engraved brass plate came to twice the price. What however really brought out the big smile was that mechanically these units were in perfect condition - drivers, cross-overs, the lot. So, apart from the cosmetic upgrade, nothing else was required for the AR94's to be moved into their final position.

Eventually hooking up the speakers to the Onkyo in normal hi-fi mode produced the characteristic clear and forward Polite Boston sound, not quite as laid back as the AR48’s, but the AR heritage was unmistakable. With the AR48's at that stage being crippled, and the AR3a's still far off on the horizon, the 94's became the hi-fi drivers for the time being, and after them doing duty for a month I had to admit that I had seriously under-estimated these seemingly cheap units. And so I suspect did the general hi-fi community of the Eighties - the AR94 demands a heap of respect and in the Spring of 2009 it simply was the best speaker in my stable.

They scored more points late 2009 when the Onkyo receiver's shortcomings started coming to the fore; several bouts of extreme clipping left no marks on the drivers (something which would certainly have blown the more fragile AR48's to pieces).  These were seriously robust speakers, and earlier comments by others recommending AR94's for home theatre application started making sense.  In a home theatre setup they easily handle music as well as anything out there, and as of December 2009 I was yet to find a need for a sub-woofer - the two 10-inchers in the AR94's were moving the pot plants in the room.

While I'm on the subject, as can be seen from pics on this page, an early room layout had a lush and healthy fern close to one of the AR94's, and within a month the branches and leaves on the speaker's side started to wilt and die!  When I moved it to another part of the room, it recovered. Plants may like music, but ferns definitely hate the low frequencies.