identifying age by serial number

[vmax700]

Can a speakers production time (ie age) be determined by serial number? thanks for your help in advance

[glen]

Can a speakers production time (ie age) be determined by serial number? thanks for your help in advance

Maybe, JBL lost their files sometime in the past, so there's not a big, up-to-date serial number database.

But there are a couple of efforts going on to try and remedy that,
a registry was started, and is being maintained (offline) by Hofmannhp:
http://audioheritage.org/vbulletin/member.php?u=483

and I started a thread just to accumulate speaker serial numbers, a few of which are dated, which eventually may accumulate enough data to rebuild a serial number/ build date database:
http://audioheritage.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=8792

At this point it depends a lot on the speaker model and the driver serial numbers (if you have those) whether any date can be associated with it.

Why don't you go ahead and post your speaker model and serial numbers and see what we can make of it?

[Gary L]

Where Altecs are concerned I believe but do not know this for a fact!

Most components have a number that begins with 391XXX.

I've been told the XXX is the year and week of production. This would mean 391122 would be made in 1971 in the 22 week.
What I am not sure of is how this is affected when the year is 1971 or 1981.

Gary