Hallo, you are very welcome,
I love to write about the fascinating old soviet HIFI gear --- so well engineered
Here as promised are pictures of the very nice (conventional passive) soviet Speaker
Radiotehnika Riga Rigonda (RRR) AC35/S90-B
Very linear frequency response, an Acoustic Research AR3a Speaker wont do it better.
I can tell you this type of speaker is as good (if not even better)
than any German made T&A, Grundig, DUAL, SABA, Klein and Hummel or Telefunken top of the line speaker
in its size and power range. You might call the S90B a "vintage high end class" but still conventional speaker.
Nothing cheaply made on the Radiotehnika S90 series. (Okay no styling gimmicks as well, but I don´t need glitzy styling if
the speaker performs excellent, and my S90b does.)
Heavy as hell these S90, you will se why, dont think its plastic or fakewood trash
the frontal "klingon looking" grills only cover solid woodbodies and
ultra heavy bass + mid cone speakers and a very well made polyproylenium dome tweeter.
All those speaker chassis have rock solid cast alloy bodies and giant magnets.
with 150 Rubles they cost around 1.25 month salary of a soviet engineer (one speaker)
very heavy 25 Ohms (!) tweeter with cast frame, I prefer this kind of polypropylenium tweeter over silk and titanium ultra high tech tweeters, normal grade silk tweeters tend to tighten the tonal structure obove 15.000 HZ and titanium tweeters may show a sharp/harsh top end, so the polyprop is just in the middle of this...not too less and not too much high frequency dominance.
I noticed the same tendence with comparisons in other speakers from Visaton/Germany, ELAC and Canton.
very solid cone midrange drivers, also with cast alloy body, good response of sax, trumpets and voices...you will have to look
to very expensive high end stuff to get a better mid tone. I already did some comparisons, even against todays computer
optimized trick stuff (B&W etc...) the old soviets perform nicely.
These bass drivers are monsters and kick ass as hell,
you cant imagine how heavy they are...and good as well,
very responsive, clean and deeeeep bass.
Crossover of an Acoustic Research AR3a speaker (This classic US made 3 way speaker is good I know...)
For Comparison thats the crossover network of the soviet speaker
Older type (thats pretty massive military grade coil and high voltage foil-cap stuff)
Newer Type with capacitors that have more uF in a single housing, so less caps needed here for same electrical characteristics
these newer crossovers come with silver plated wire wound MIL SPEC attenuators for tweeter and midrange.
Thats a photo of the internal cirquitry installed in the speaker wood housings
