June 2020 Review
I bought these used, complete with LFAU, way back in 1996, apparently mine were the originals demonstrated at various European hifi conventions in late 89 and 1990's.
We have a large living room 50sqM and simply put they are definitely full range down to 20hz that you can feel at high volumes and transparent in the sound field. They are complex for an amp to drive and you absolutely need a high current capable amp, forget the marketing mans "watts into a resistor", think Amps ! mine are capably "fed and watered" by an AudioAnalyse A90 Class-A 90w French amp that is also still going strong and clean, albeit after a couple of quality repairs following lightning strikes, twice five years apart, on the mains lines in our area.
These days everything in the rack is plugged in either through a Titan (power amps) or ISOL-8 minisub (sources) and no more mains issues ! The Titan is amazing, it can deliver endless instantaneous current and the Caps in the A90 keep it going at volume for another 12 seconds if you switch the A90 amp off at the mains! point being modulating a clean, reliable and strong mains in a precise manner is what its all about really especially to drive the 767's.
after I bought the 767's made some tweaks.
I removed almost all banana plugs needed by the LFAU, (12.... think a lot of contact resistance in the high current end signal path) and created a custom speaker wiring loom, that bi-wires HF & MF straight from A90 out to speakers with LF to LFAU in and a separate wire from LFAU out to speakers LF in. It removes options to fine tune profile mid-base in the LFAU A-E mode switch but still leaves 6db base level adjustment, wow what a clean sound. The guy I bought them off came for a demo when he heard about the new speaker loom and could not believe the difference, he was p..d as he had bought another expensive rig and they now sounded "better" than that.
In '97 I replaced all 10 drivers 2xHF/4xMF/4xLF from mission whilst they were still available in stock, that really cleaned everything up after all that heavy demo-ing in their previous life.
Once a year I tighten the drivers screws as they do loosen and every second year a light clean with the exotic Mr Sheen and they look brand new Rosewood.
In about 2010 the LFAU developed a 50hz PSU (old age) hum, and there were no suitable PSX-1's around so I had a tech make an off-board separate PSU for the LFAU and wow, the noise floor, what noise floor.
There is no listening fatigue at all, the rig and 767's are natural you can listen all day at reasonable volumes to classical, acoustic, pop, folk or even reggae if that's your taste.
The only disadvantage with these vintage reference speakers is, GiGo, you do need top end analogue source and pre-amp and also finding top quality well produced music content that is not over produced or has singers in soundproof recording booths, you can definitely hear that, we go to a lot of live orchestra and folk concerts and they are our baseline for hi-fidelity reproduction as they are live artists. So any bad recordings sound horrid, and great recordings sound completely natural, musical and entertaining.
If something happened to the 767's and I had to replace with a modern equivalent quality and capability, I suspect the nearest modern equvalent would be KEF Blade-2's and I simply cannot afford them. The 767's have the WOW factor as they disappear in the precise 3D sound field they generate.
Also on visit once, my auntie tried to find the door in them to hang her coat in the 767's as she thought they were wardrobes !
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