Altec Nineteen or VOTTs

For the Nineteens:

The driver is the 416-8b (15")
811b horn
cross over 1200hz

With the walnut cabinet.

Condition he describes as "pristine"

The owner, who is moving to London from Europe, won't be able to get them in and out his new place without expensive window lifting. So hearing them is probably off the agenda.

 

both sound very nice IMO.

The 19's will be in cabinets that will look nicer in the home, but the VOTTS are likely to have slightly better bass, which is horn loaded instead of ported.

are they the same money?

 

Update and some JBL pron

Altec man has been busy organising his move and so no real progress there. I think he's looking for around £1,500 for the Nineteens, probably a bit less for the VoTTs.

Meanwhile I have been exploring the JBL options. First up a pair of 4435's in Peckham.

These are the ones on the right (erm, fails to figure out how to insert picture)

Anyway, each speaker weighs 114kg Has not one but two 15" drivers. And a beautiful horn shaped like how Picasso might doodle breasts.

Apparently the horn creates a sweet spot wide enough to dance in! At least in a restrained "I'm a cool dude in a studio" kind of way.

 

Allow me.

 

Now those Djibbels really are hiphop speakers. I'm not convinced they're hifi exactly (in the sense of low colouration & low distortion), but do you remember that maxell ad from the 80s with Peter Murphy...
There used to be a hiphop record store in shibuya that had a pair of these on the 2F. They literally shook the building. Shop and building have now gone.

joel

PS the 4435 is HUGE

 

measurements (on the lansing heritage site) are excellent for these speakers. They do a good job with time alignment and replicating a square wave too.

Where they fall short is on treble extension mainly. Being a studio monitor, the designer felt that it was better to use EQ to lift the treble of the horn, rather than cause comb-filtering and other integration issues by adding a super tweeter. Not a 'hifi' solution in the audiophile sense of the word, but I can see the logic in what he has to say.

The biggest problem with second hand purchases, tend to be the worn foam on the bass drivers, which perishes and needs replacing every 10 years or so.

Great speakers having said all that.

NB Currently reading the '60 year' JBL story. A great read if you're a JBL nut.

 

The ones I've heard may have been shagged, but I do think these are coloured

I have first-hand experience of this, and it is bad, very bad. The last thing you want is a horn eq'd up from around 5kHz.
It appears I now have a second pair of NS-1000x. Actually a pair of minty NS-1000XW.

 

What does the w designate?

 

Hi joel

Have you heard any of the current JBL models (specifically the 4348, 4338, 4428, 4318 or 4312D)?

Unfortunately, they're only obtainable in the far east, I think.

 

Yeah. Just about all of those. I came very close to buying a pair of 4338s and rather less close to buying a pair of 4428s. Still have a pair of 4311s in storage somewhere.

 

Oooh, very nice. Auntie would approve. Probably rare as rockin horse sh*t round here though

 

How would you compare the 4338 to your NS-1000Xs?

(Would have thought they weren't too dissimilar).

 

4435 details:

http://www.audioheritage.org/html/profiles/jbl/4430-35.htm

4435 measurements

http://www.lansingheritage.org/html/jbl/specs/pro-speakers/1984-4430-35.htm

 

This is what the XW look like (not the actual pair I'm buying):

The black speaker in the right-hand photo is mine.

The hifido database allows us to search for how many of any particular model hifido has sold since 2000:
NS-1000M 125 pairs
NS-1000X 27 pairs of which 2 pairs are NS-1000XW
NS-2000 5 pairs
No NS10000s

So, they're not exctly common here either.

I'd have been perfectly happy with another pair of black 1000X TBH. The point of the exercise is to bring one pair back to spec while I use the other pair. At the end I hope to have two pairs in perfect working order (not that they're broken now, but after 25 years, it's time for a service). I'm not sure what I'll do when they're both done.

I haven't done a direct comparison, least of all in my room, but the Yamaha NS-1000 approach and the JBL approach are very different in a few imprtant areas (cabinet design and driver type being the obvious ones to me). It's a bit unfair to compare the 4338 with the 1000X. The 4428 is much closer in size to the NS-1000 series.
There seems to be a little of the JBL in the way the Yams handle 100~500Hz, though (oh, and both systems begin to roll of @ around 10kHz)...

I think listening should be the final arbiter. The ones I've heard were probably shagged, but I'm still not convinced these are strictly viable as hifi (a CD/horn that is flat to 20kHz in a 2-way system requires very careful investigation IMHO). Enormous fun, though.

 

When I said compare the 4338 to the 1000X, I was talking about the really 'large' yamahas. I've just realised that these are called the NS-1000M's! (never knew there were smaller versions)

I would expect the NS-1000M's to need more power than the 4338s.

 

Hehe, the 1000X are really quite large - slightly larger than the 1000Ms in fact, and a great deal heavier. But those JBLs are really, seriously, huge.
Yamaha did build a couple of competitors to an earlier version of the 4338 back in the late 70s / early 80s; the FX-1 and FX-3
Here's an FX-3


The 1000X is not a particularly easy speaker to drive. It likes lots of quality power.

 

Right.got it. Thanks for clearing that up. :MILD:

(one day it would be interesting to hear if you went further down the Pioneer TAD route mentioned a while back)

 

Mmmm. Must listen to those Yams one day.

Back to the JBL 4435s.

It's funny how even when you get out a tape measure to see just how big is a particularly big thing, somehow, in the flesh, it always seems bigger still. So it was with the 4435s. I'd looked them up on Lansingheritage and measured them against my Tannoys. Not that much bigger really. I thought.

Erm wrong. These monsters are honestly closer to a double decker bus than they are to my Tannoys.

Mind you they sound like no bus I've ever heard. In fact they sound surprisingly smooth. Refined even in a very loud kind of way. Like the Tannoys they had that rich bell like quality in the midrange. But they also had deep clear bass which unlike the Tannoys didn't swamp everything else.

Joel asked if they are hi-fi, which is not a question I'm qualified to answer. So much live music is amplified and played through speakers anyway I'm not always sure what is meant by a live sound.

So lets say that if your taste in live music is more warehouse party or Brixton Academy than it is string quartet then they are really very convincing indeed.

Had they only been a bit narrower I'd have bought them!

Luckily Rich (the seller) had some other speakers which have inspired an alternative cunning plan....

 

I'd love a pair of 2251s, but they are comfortably rarer than rocking horse sh*t.



Pioneer's Page

It's the other way round with me In the shop/tardis everything usually looks reasonably sized and of manageable proportions, but has grown huge by the time it gets home.

Excellent. I am very happy to accept that the pairs I've heard have been shagged.

Before the Yams, I had a pair of Electro Voice studio monitors. These are fantastic speakers, but they have two faults, one of which was fatal for me. The fatal flaw was the way the horn was eq'd up from 5kHz. This overemphasised essing and often caused distortion on fricatives (fffer fffu etc). The non-fatal flaw was a slight dip at the xover point which caused strings to sound a little thin on occasion. This was very minor (ATCs seem to have a similar balance to my ears), and had the fatal flaw been absent, I would still have had the EVs I think.
Something the EVs did not do was add "pink" colouration to voices / insrtuments at 1kHz. THe JBL 4428s were heinous in this respect.
Xover colouration and the fffricative/ essing are useful things to listen out for when demoing horns IME.

out with it... we NEED to know!