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Anyone own RSL 3300's?

Rectilinear1

Rectilinear1

Professional Record Restorer
I picked these up at the used record store in town for just under $200. They seem to be in pretty good shape and they play flawlessly. My question is does anyone have any experience with these? There aren't any currently for sale anywhere online and specs on these are hard to find. Anyone have these? Love em'? Hate em'? Let's open this up for discussion! Thanks for your help guys. :)

RSL 3300 Pic1 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic1 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic2 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic2 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic3 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic3 (2)

  • Media owner Rectilinear1
  • Date added
  • Comments 2
RSL 3300 Pic4 (2)

RSL 3300 Pic4 (2)

 
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There is a nice thread here that covers a lot of RSL models:
https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/rsl-speakers-am-i-alone.98760/

The 3300's were designed to be a direct competitor for the JBL 100 back in the 1970's. The later series 3300's switched to dome tweeters then they were replaced entirely by the 3600 which was basically the same speaker but the model number change made it seem new! (lol)

As long as all of the drivers and cross-over components are working properly, and especially the level control potentiometers, they are a fine sounding speaker. A cross-over re-cap wouldn't hurt by any means. At the time these were being offered for sale in the Los Angeles area they were a very good value for the money compared to most competing models at that time.
 
Thank you so much for the info you guys. Those brochures helped out a lot. Yeah, I've seen all of the threads on RSL's on AK but never have I seen these particular speakers. I own JBL L-100 Centuries and I have demoed them side by side in my living room playing on my Marantz and here are my personal findings... (at least to my ears). The RSL 3300's sound like L-100's without the dreaded midrange problem. In the RSL's, they crossover the woofer to keep the midrange frequencies from being too forward and now the vocals "sit-right" in the mix and play through the 5" midrange drivers instead of the 12" full range woofers that are in the JBL's. That being said, as long as you have a midrange knob on your receiver that you can turn down, the L-100's are really good speakers. My theory is, I'd rather have too much of something I can turn down than something that's not there to begin with that I can't turn up. Now I don't have to worry about it. The RSL 3300's sound how I thought the L-100's would sound when I bought them.

Has anyone heard a set of these? These are two of the only speakers I have seen with fuses built in to protect the speakers from over powering. Both potentiometers work flawlessly with no scratchiness at all. I think I may have found a decent set of speakers here. And $199 seems like a fair price. Let's get some more opinions!! :)
 
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Vintage RSL speakers are very underrated. I’d put them up against any of JBL speakers of the same era. In fact JBL sued RSL for copying some off their designs. I have a pair of Elans that replaced a pair of JBL L100s at 1/4 the price.

B8C55FFC-496E-4E9F-944F-7B1C20CDFE08.jpeg
 
stickman said:
There is a nice thread here that covers a lot of RSL models:
https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/rsl-speakers-am-i-alone.98760/

The 3300's were designed to be a direct competitor for the JBL 100 back in the 1970's. The later series 3300's switched to dome tweeters then they were replaced entirely by the 3600 which was basically the same speaker but the model number change made it seem new! (lol)

As long as all of the drivers and cross-over components are working properly, and especially the level control potentiometers, they are a fine sounding speaker. A cross-over re-cap wouldn't hurt by any means. At the time these were being offered for sale in the Los Angeles area they were a very good value for the money compared to most competing models at that time.
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I have a pair of 3600 that I bought new. I lived a couple blocks from the RSL outlet on Beach Boulevard in Westminster. (I also bought my first Yamaha DSP integrated and Yamaha tuner there when they first came out.) The 3600 uses a poly woofer and they are not as highly regarded as the prior 3300, though I've never compared the sound. Mine have been refoamed (properly) years ago and they just sit in the bedroom. They actually offered the grill cloth in two styles; one with a squared edge and one with a beveled edge.

BTW, they were literally 1/2 the price of the JBL L100s ($300/pr vs $300/each) at the time.
 
audiocrzy said:
Vintage RSL speakers are very underrated. I’d put them up against any of JBL speakers of the same era. In fact JBL sued RSL for copying some off their designs. I have a pair of Elans that replaced a pair of JBL L100s at 1/4 the price.

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Wow, those look like nice speakers. :eek: I am glad to hear that people generally like RSL's so far. I had no idea if they were just a cheap knock off of JBLs or what. Now I know. Why are they so rare? Did they just not make that many or do people just not know the brand?
 
toddalin said:
I have a pair of 3600 that I bought new.

BTW, they were literally 1/2 the price of the JBL L100s ($300/pr vs $300/each) at the time.
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Yeah, after hearing them both, The JBL's would have stayed on the show room floor at double the price. The 3300's more than satisfy me in the sound quality department. They are just as bright with rich deep bass which seems to build sound pressure effortlessly and the mids are warm and buttery just how I like em' and not too forward as to mud up the vocals to the point of getting "squawky" like the L-100's with eq set to flat. I can see why JBL sued them. This is all great info guys. Keep it coming! Anybody else want to chime in on the sound quality they have experienced with their RSL's?
 
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The story I heard was RSL sold-out to a company in Japan. That company drove the brand in the wrong direction and it suffered considerably in sales. The original owner bought it back and is still deigning and selling speakers for home theater. My information may not be specific but you get the idea.
I’ve had a few conversations with the owner with questions I’ve had about RSL speakers I’ve owned. He was always very willing to answer my questions or lead me to a direction that could.

https://rslspeakers.com/professional-reviews/
 
To Toddalin above: If your RSL speakers have a polycone woofer with a foam surround, then you have the 3800 model which used drivers made by Foster/Fostex in Japan. I never cared for the sound of the 3800 and was surprised RSL sold as many of them as they did. The other Foster/Fostex driver models sold at RSL were the 1600 and the 2600 which I also thought didn't sound very good

To audiocrzy: RSL was sold by the original owner about 1988 to a US based investment group that put a guy in charge who came from the Silo chain of stores who didn't grasp the RSL brand mindset and just wanted to focus on inexpensive, low quality "entry level" items and it started to go downhill from there. About the same time the Good Guys chain moved into Southern California which was a direct competitor featuring similar products (except for RSL speakers that is). The original owner bought back the rights to the RSL brand name and speaker operation at a bankruptcy sale in 1992 or 93 and a couple of decades later opened the new RSL Home Theater Speaker company with his son which has been doing very well ever since. They are great people to deal with and offer high quality speakers at a reasonable cost including the very highly regarded speedwoofers.

Getting back to Rectilinear1: The 3300's had an advantage over the later 3600 model which followed in that the midrange drivers used in the 3300's tended to remain fully functional over the following decades. The 3600's were often made with a sealed back Gefco sourced midrange driver (EIA Code 1056 that was Fisher in the 1960's and became Gefco by the early 1970's) that had a tendency to become stiff and frozen so that the cones could barely move even with moderate finger pressure applied. I don't know if this was due to ferro-fluid or not but once those mids "seized up" so to speak the midrange sound quality went out the window and the drivers became useless. I have a pair of 3600's with mids that went bad and replaced the stock drivers with mids from 3300's which are still functioning just fine.
 
stickman said:
To Toddalin above: If your RSL speakers have a polycone woofer with a foam surround, then you have the 3800 model which used drivers made by Foster/Fostex in Japan.
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You're probably right. It's been years since I've looked at them with the grills off.
 
Great info guys. Thank you so much! I understand that JBL makes all their own drivers and designs their own speakers and tests them thoroughly. I do not expect other brands to put as much time or money into them as JBL has. Therefore, I probably cannot expect the RSL's to last as long. Here's a perfect example... Although the RSL 3300 and JBL L-100's are similar, the RSL's only handle 100 watts whereas the JBL's handle up to 200 continuous program watts. This is most likely due to the fact that JBL has beefier components like 6lb. Alnico v-style magnets, etc. So for my money, I'd probably pop for the extra bucks and get the JBL's which last virtually forever as opposed to going cheaper and having to replace them more frequently. What are your guys' thoughts regarding longevity? Do you think it is better to save and get the name brand? Or cut the price in half and deal with possible repairs/premature failure? Or do you guys consider RSL to be cheaters in the business world who stole the design from JBL and didnt have to pay for any of the r&d that went into designing their 3300's so they could offer them at half the price? Basically, what I am asking is...are these speakers just like the Gibson "lawsuit guitar" ?
 
JBL did not have any kind of patent or trademark on 12" three way "studio monitor" style speakers as that driver configuration was so common and generic even back then. RSL was not the only company by any means to offer such a speaker designed to look similar to the L-100 with the grill removed. RSL used high quality drivers from well respected OEM suppliers such as Pyle (primarily the woofers), with mids from Gefco or Peerless or Rola (etc), and tweeters from CTS, Peerless and SEAS (among others) like all of the other speaker companies back then that did not manufacture their own drivers, which was most of them.

If not over driven, then RSL speakers will last as long as comparable quality speakers from that era (the 1970's) using similar drivers would have lasted. JBL did manufacture their own drivers designed for higher power operation levels than most OEM drivers of that era and charged a premium price for that feature. JBL speakers were a bit of a status symbol and many were sold for that reason alone.
 
That's a great write up stickman, thank you so much for the information you have offered. I guess what is so crazy to me is that RSL took a legendary speaker (the L-100), and actually made it better by adding crossover components to the woofer and totally smashing the shortcomings of the JBL entirely. JBL must have been pissed. I know I would have been. I am glad that JBL finally recognized the problem and fixed it in the new L-100 classics. I have just recently heard a set of classics and they are superior in every way to my vintage version. They have tight and boomy bass, warm mids, and brilliant highs which scream into the heavens well past human hearing. If I had 4 grand to spend, I might be tempted but as it sits right now, I love finding underrated bargains which are normally overlooked and fly well under the radar of audiophiles the world over. :)
 
audiocrzy said:
The story I heard was RSL sold-out to a company in Japan. That company drove the brand in the wrong direction and it suffered considerably in sales. The original owner bought it back and is still deigning and selling speakers for home theater. My information may not be specific but you get the idea.
I’ve had a few conversations with the owner with questions I’ve had about RSL speakers I’ve owned. He was always very willing to answer my questions or lead me to a direction that could.

https://rslspeakers.com/professional-reviews/
Click to expand...
My reading of the RSL story gave me the impression the founder had a few stores with RSL speakers as the house brand. The speakers basically ended with the selling of the shops and the new owners not realizing what made the business work. Unfortunately being on the east coast it is unlikely I'll have a chance to hear any of the vintage RSL speakers, though I did consider purchasing a pair of their satelites with a sub(got ZU DWs instead).
 
RSL was a small chain of stores in the Greater Los Angeles area (they did go east as far as Claremont) that sold their speakers as a house brand and never marketed them to any other sellers, so the distribution was very limited. JBL knew (if they even cared) that RSL speakers presented no threat to market share since RSL operated on such a small scale.

JBL was very aware of Advent though in the early 1970's as a JBL factory rep came and gave a presentation at my local Pacific Stereo store where they had cut away JBL drivers from an L-100 and a cut away woofer and tweeter from an Original Large Advent for comparison. Of course JBL picked a top competitor with the crudest looking drivers they could find! (lol)
 
stickman said:
RSL was a small chain of stores in the Greater Los Angeles area (they did go east as far as Claremont) that sold their speakers as a house brand and never marketed them to any other sellers, so the distribution was very limited. JBL knew (if they even cared) that RSL speakers presented no threat to market share since RSL operated on such a small scale.

JBL was very aware of Advent though in the early 1970's as a JBL factory rep came and gave a presentation at my local Pacific Stereo store where they had cut away JBL drivers from an L-100 and a cut away woofer and tweeter from an Original Large Advent for comparison. Of course JBL picked a top competitor with the crudest looking drivers they could find! (lol)
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Well of course they used the advents as a side by side comparison. That would be like Lamborghini having a car expo showing a side by side comparison next to a Toyota corolla cut away. :rflmao:
 
Rectilinear1 said:
Wait, you sold your Elans? Whyyyyyyyyyyy? Those are two of my favorite speakers ever!! What on earth replaced them? Jennings Research made epic speakers. I would NEVER sell a pair of those.
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I had this silly notion that I should only possess 3 pairs of speakers… big ones, medium ones, and small ones. At the time I had just rebuilt a pair of Kef KM1s, and I had a pair of Cornwalls for my medium ones and my smalls were B&W 801s. The Elans and a dozen others were evicted…I don’t have any of those anymore. Divorce. I wish I had just put the Elans in the attic…
 
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