Worth remembering that acoustic suspension speakers came onto the market about the same time as stereo started becoming common. At the the time, if you wanted a speaker with decent bass, your choice was of large and larger speakers. Otherwise, you had boomy bass, and not very deep bass either. Few people want or can afford the space and money for a pair of Klipschorns or Bozak Concert Grands.
So along comes AR with small speakers that do produce very low bass, are smoother and lower distortion than competitive speakers, and they are relatively affordable. Their lack of efficiency was not a problem since push pull amps like the Williamson had made higher power widely available. Add to that the intelligent informative advertising that Ed Vilchur produced, and you had a product that sold itself -- if memory serves, at some point AR had a third of the market.
Sure the ARs were duller sounding (because they had smoother response), but most cartridges at the time were peaky, and other common sources were pretty rolled off to begin with, so not much may have been lost, and some benefit was certainly gained.
I disagree vehemently with the comments about pointyheaded Volvo drivers types -- I don't see intelligence as a cardinal sin, and be real -- all audio equipment ads back then were aimed at the mid and upper classes, since audio was expensive back then. You don't capture that amount of market share with just the poser market. And just who do you think JBL, Altec, Bozak, Klipsch and so on were advertising to? It was a time when the middle class was expanding rapidly, and wanted the appurtenances of upper class life. And serious jazz was actually popular then -- why wouldn't AR use popular musicians in ads?
