Acoustic Research AR-303a Speakers

[tmallin]

I'd like to stress that even though these speakers are very "recording friendly"--as in, they sound wonderful on most any program material--they are also quite transparent to differences among recordings and to changes you make in your audio system. You hear the differences, all right, but usually the nastiness that other speakers evince just isn't there with these.

I just power cycled my Xfinity router since I thought the presentation was getting too laid back, smaller/less expansive than usual, and less dynamically unstrained than usual. The magic is back, fully revealed by the AR speakers.

 

[tmallin]

I was asked if the AR-303 and AR-303a are really different speakers, or just alternate names for the same design. In short, they are in fact two separate designs with the AR-303 release preceding the AR-303a release by about a year.

I have searched in vain for online discussions of any possible performance differences between the AR-303 and AR-303a. As far as I knew, there are only physical differences relating to the binding posts and bi-amp/bi-wire capability.

All the AR-303 units I've seen pictures of have a single pair of red and black plastic enshrouded five-way posts.

All the AR-303a speakers I''ve owned (the two pairs I own now and the other pair I owned more than a decade ago) as well as all the other pairs I've seen pictures of online have two sets of five-way binding posts that are gold-plated with jumpers connecting the two sets of posts. With my prior pair I removed the jumpers and bi-amped them with four channels of an Arcam AVR600 AV receiver. With my current two pairs I keep the jumpers in place and single-amp/single-wire them with the Lyngdorf TDAI-3400.

The pictures of both models reveal the nomenclature written on the back under the binding post plates. Mine are clearly labeled AR-303a, while the single post versions are labeled AR-303.

I have seen online comments saying that the 303 rapidly transitioned to the 303a when they were introduced in 1995. Other than that comment, I had not seen any discussion of the model differences.

But then yesterday I discovered brochures for both models captured on The Classic Speaker Pages.
The AR-303a brochure refers to the prior 1994 AR-303 model. See this image from the AR-303a brochure on The Classic Speaker Pages. The ad copy in that image says the 303a "features a redesigned crossover network, heavy duty 14 AWG internal wiring and bi-wire/bi-amp capability with improved gold-plated 5-way binding posts." The crossover frequencies and slopes are listed as the same in both the 303a and 303 brochures.

The earlier 303 series brochure can be found here on The Classic Speaker Pages.