Allisons

emoxley

I have an old pair of Allison AL-115 speakers, I've had about 15 yrs.
I recently bought a new receiver (Onkyo TX-SR805), and when running the Audyssey automatic calibration on the speakers, it wouldn't recognize the fronts (my Allisons). I took the grills off, to see if that would help, and found the foam has dry rotted, and falling apart. It broke my heart! I love these speakers. I guess I'm going to get a refoam kit, and redo them myself. I've never done this before, but heard it isn't hard. Step by step instructions come with the kit. In the meantime, I'm using some LSi9s, a friend gave me. I like them a lot too............

My friend also gave me the matching LSiC center speaker. Now that the three front speakers match, I may see how the Allisons sound as rear speakers, once I redo them.

mhardy6647

Refoaming isn't terribly difficult and it's inexpensive to DIY. It's also cost-effective to send the woofers to a pro if you prefer.

Allison made some fine speakers. Roy Allison, you probably know, was part of the AR brain trust (with Kloss and Villchur); he knows his stuff (and, last I knew, he's still around). I am not familiar with the "AL" series, though.
Fairly recent interview with Allison: http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/105villchur/index2.html

Allison info a-plenty at www.classicspeakerpages.net, specifically at
http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/library/allison/

FYI I have a pair of Allison Ones, which are quite nice.

vlam

I still have a pair of CD6 that I was using as rear surround for until I too noticed that the 8" woofer needed re-foaming. Let me know which kits you decided to go with. Reading the instructions for refoaming, it doesn't sound too hard, just take some work and patience.

emoxley

mhardy...
Allison Ones? Very nice! They were their top of the line speakers. I've wanted a pair of those for years. Occasionally they show up on eBay.
vlam...
I've thought too, that CD6s would make great rear speakers. I guess you liked them there?

There's also a group of Allison lovers at Yahoo, and Roy answers questions there sometimes. I've lost the address to it, but you can do a search for Allison speakers, in the Yahoo Groups area. Allison's site was just taken down in the last few months. It was up for a long time, even after they went out of business...............again.

If you're familiar with the newer Allisons, my AL-115s are the same speaker as the PB 8.2s they made (that's what Roy said), only older. Big difference in price though. Fifteen yrs. ago, my AL-115s were $400 a pair. The newer PB 8.2s were about $1350 a pair. Mine have the older speaker wire clips, instead of the posts. I'm sorry they went out of business...........

There's a couple of videos on YouTube, showing how to refoam speakers. Interesting to watch, if you've never seen it done. Here's one of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4cTvxcZps&feature=channel_page
and there's another one to click on, on the right hand side.

bikezappa

I also had the Allison 1 and still use my Allison CD in the garage.

Nice speakers.

mhardy6647

emoxley wrote: »

mhardy...
Allison Ones? Very nice! They were their top of the line speakers. I've wanted a pair of those for years. Occasionally they show up on eBay.

Yup, found 'em at the dump :-) Had to refoam three, and replace one woofer. Otherwise they were in pretty good shape (grilles are very brittle, though). They are very good sounding speakers. Fans of Polk's early "monitor series" would be right at home, and maybe even a bit impressed, by them.