We found these at a garage sale for $25 for the pair. They were missing the tweeters and x-overs and their holes were covered so to be used as subwoofers.
Is that actual acoustical foam or just fiberglass?
The grill looks more like Marantz or something else entirely?
I couldn't tell you which company manufactured the cabinets, but the fretwork grille is a dead ringer for the grille used on the Valencia. The emblem on your grill is suspect,
as it appears to the size of later model ALTEC emblems. The cabinets are obviously victims of a hack job. They're not a cabinets I would load with a 2231. Much too small.
The 2231 is the pro number for the 136A, which was loaded into the L300 Summit cabinet.
The original Valencia grilles were comprised of probably 400 to 500 separate pieces of profiled wood, then glued together.
That explains when Valencias are auctioned on Ebay, some of them have holes in the grilles. That is because some of the pieces have either fallen apart, or broken off.
I'm not sure when this happened, but later Valencia model grilles were die stamped out of a single sheet of Masonite.
Curious. Are the cabinets covered in real wood veneer, or vinyl that looks like wood?
http://www.soundup.ru/images/stories/archive/Classic/Columns/altec-846a-valencia-speaker-cabinet-1969/altec-846a-valencia-speaker-cabinet-1969-3.jpg
Yes it seems the vinyl-coated cabinets are pretty much toast. Sometimes I'll use toasted cabinets for making other things. A pair of L20T's I turned into floodlamps for the living room, never got around to making a reptile tank but it's on the list
The 2231A's inside them were a nice find for only $12.50 each! But alas, they're in pretty bad shape alignment-wise.
I can't find that grille design on anything but the Valencia. Sansui and Realistic appear to come real close from some google searches.
I suspect the grilles on your cabinets were removed from a pair of Valencias, probably because they were broken. What was left usable were made into the current grilles.Originally Posted by DanMan
Yes it seems the vinyl-coated cabinets are pretty much toast. Sometimes I'll use toasted cabinets for making other things. A pair of L20T's I turned into floodlamps for the living room, never got around to making a reptile tank but it's on the list
The 2231A's inside them were a nice find for only $12.50 each! But alas, they're in pretty bad shape alignment-wise.
I can't find that grille design on anything but the Valencia. Sansui and Realistic appear to come real close from some google searches.
The Magnificent and one model of the Malibu had die stamped grilles out of Masonite, but they were a different design from the Valencia. What kills me about he original Valencia
grilles, was the pain staking effort to assemble hundreds of small pieces of wood. Even worse, were the grilles used on the JBL Olympus. There were thousands of individual
crescent shaped pieces of wood no bigger than the tip of your pinky finger glued together. Someone decades ago told me they were manufactured in Malaysia. Probably using child
slave labor at a penny and a bowl of rice an hour.
There was a chap on Ebay several years ago who reproduced a pair of Valencia grilles in plastic cut on a CNC machine. He made them with the intent of going into business selling them.
The problem with that, the Valencia grille in it's completed form cannot be made on a CNC machine. There are too many right angle corners. Round cutting bits cannot make square
corners on a flat plane. I have a method of reproducing the Valencia grilles properly in hardwood. However, I am reluctant to invest in the tooling at this time, as I would be chasing a very narrow market.
I think that this may have been a Fisher speaker originally. Do a google image search and you should see some that look similar.
Edit:
An example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-The-...-/141795401628
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