Snell Type A/II or Type E/III - opinions wanted

Many years ago I owned a pair of AIII i and they were a great speaker. A couple of things to keep in mind, they really need to be bi-amped to get the best out of them and you will need a big room to get the full benefit from them. When set up correctly they are a great speaker.

What price point are you looking at? These are pretty old and one wonders if some other new speaker would be a better fit.

I've seen the Bs on the 'bay. One pair local pickup only and the other pair after shipping would easily top $2ooo... more than I need to spend if I want to keep "happily" in front of "married".

I can have the A/II for right at $900 and he's willing to take my E/III in exchange... I think right about $400 trade in credit.

My listening room isn't what I would describe as "large" but it's been an adequate home for large Maggies, Vandersteen 2C, Dahlquist (20i & 30) as well as the top of the food chain in vintage AR. I run one Adcom GFA-555mkII, can add a second, but also wonder what the Type A might sound like with McIntosh SS?

As for the age of the speaker, again, these have been recently overhauled, completely. The owner describes them as "better than new"?

I'd agree that it's worth considering a more recent model, unless you really need a model that Peter Snell himself designed.

The models designed by Kevin Voecks, like your J/IV, were very, very well reviewed by Stereophile magazine. In particular, the Type D, which I own and love, and the C/V, which recieve numerous glowing remarks on this board, are both astounding used speaker values. Both models often sell in the $1000 or less range with the D's occasionally dipping into the $600 range.

A set of Type D's is on sale on this board now for $800 -> http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?spkrfull&1275012004

You really should try to give the Type D's and Type C/V's a listen.

The bass goes very low on both. Don't forget that Snell was very strict with frequency response measurements. They used an anechoic chamber and limited their published numbers to usually +/- 2dB (sometimes less!), which is not the industry norm. The Type D was listed as 36Hz to 20kHz +/- 1.75dB anechoic. Stereophile's testing revealed them to be good to "at least 30Hz". The C/V's went even lower.

Finally, the old Snell specifications page that can be found via Google and was posted by Snell several years back contains several incorrect entries, those specifications can not be used reliably.

I have nothing against the Kevin Voecks designs, the J/IV is an exceptional speaker. I did get to extensively demo a local pair of Type D with a stack of Naim in a better room than mine. They seemed easier to place than the E/III (in my room) and sounded very good but more like my E/III than different enough to call them a significant upgrade. I had also been considering the C/II of which a few pairs have popped up recently but none are close enough to demo and I suspect from the similarity of design that they too will fall into the "similar to the Type D and E/III" pool as well.

I'd love to find a pair of Type B or A/III I think but the B's have been prohibitively expensive and the A/III seems quite elusive in the wild.