Help Identify Old JBL Speakers Bought At Auction

[stevesac]

Hello:
I bought these two speakers from an online auction locally. I could tell they appeared to be 1960 era JBL's and the 15" drivers appeared to be 130's. They are 36"w x 27" h x 20" d. The cabinets appear to be professionally made and high quality. The left speaker was how I found them at purchase with cheap ratshack tweeters and with homebrew ports installed. I believe the original configuration was the D130 and 075 tweeter combination like a Baron. No crossover was installed. Lack of a proper crossover probably caused early tweeter failure, hence the cheap ratshack installation. The right speaker is after I removed the cheap tweeter and homebrew ports then stuck in a JBL 075 and a port board found stored inside both speakers. Anybody seen speakers by JBL like these? The are a little larger than the JBL Barons. I would like to restore them to original, build an appropriate crossover and add them to my vintage speaker rotation, but not sure where to start or which direction to go. They are on casters now but appear to originally have legs.

[robertg]

Most of those cabinets in the 60s and 70s were home made. The combination of a D130, 075 and N2400 crossover was called an 030. They used to sell the components as kits and then you could build your own cabinet.

They look similar to a C51 Apollo, or a C50 Olympus.

[Mr. Widget]

Yep... and many companies offered kits that allowed your average weekend warrior the ability to put together a speaker that looked first rate like these do.

I would set these up with a pair of 075s and build my own networks with a second order butterworth filter at 3KHz and a simple L-pad.
For the cabinets, use a box calculator and tune the ports to 40Hz.

The woofers look particularly clean, and the cabinets look nice too! Welcome to the Forum and congratulations on a cool find.


Widget