Altec Lansing 418B

Name: Altec 418B
Brand: Altec

A 15-inch Altec woofer that spent more time inside a bass amp than a hi-fi cabinet, and the Ampeg manual says so in print.

Overview

Most of the Altec 418B's documented life isn't in a home stereo. It's in the Ampeg B-15. The manual for that bass amp lists the 418B as optional equipment, right alongside the 421A, and recommends the B-15 for bass, guitar, and keyboard work "when equipped with Altec 418B speaker." That's the paper trail. Altec sold the driver as a component, but its best-known application was inside a flip-top bass combo built by a company that wasn't Altec. Ampeg also offered the same cabinet with a 421A, so the 418B wasn't the only option. It was the premium one, the one you spec'd when you wanted the B-15 to sound like a B-15 is supposed to sound.

Those B-15 cabinets are heavy. The manual puts one at 76 pounds (34 kg) with dimensions of 21" W x 24" H x 14" D - 53.3 cm x 61 cm x 35.6 cm. A single 15-inch driver doesn't account for that mass. The cabinet and the amp do. Still, it shows what the 418B was built for: a box that gets loaded into a station wagon every weekend, not a bookshelf. The other documented use is less glamorous. In a 2001 classified listing in Audio-Express (February 2001, p.77), a seller in New York offered a pair of 418B 15" woofers alongside a pair of 290 alnico horn drivers and an 806A. That's a parts lot, not a system.

What the 418B is not, at least in any documentation that's surfaced, is a driver with a published spec sheet. There's no frequency response curve, no sensitivity figure, no power rating, no impedance, no magnet type, no cone material in the sources on hand. The Ampeg manual says the 418B was a 15-inch speaker that Ampeg considered an upgrade. The classified says it was 15 inches and worth listing by name twenty-five-plus years after it was made. Everything else - the alnico magnet, the cast frame, the paper cone, the 16-ohm voice coil, the "West Coast sound" - gets repeated in forum threads and eBay listings. It may well be true, but it isn't documented here. Anyone writing a confident spec table for this driver is filling in blanks.

Altec built the 418B as an OEM and replacement component, and the documentation that survives is the documentation of the products it went into. The Ampeg B-15 manual is the closest thing to a primary source. It names the 418B, names the 421A as the alternative, and frames the speaker as a choice the buyer makes. So the driver was positioned as the speaker you paid extra for when ordering a B-15, not as a standalone product with its own brochure.

Collectors who chase the 418B today are usually after one of two things. Some are restoring a B-15 and want the correct Altec-era driver rather than a modern replacement, because the amp's voicing was designed around a speaker with particular characteristics. Swap in something with different sensitivity or impedance and the amp doesn't behave the same way. Others are building high-efficiency systems and want period-correct Altec 15s to pair with Altec horns and compression drivers, the 290s and 806As that show up in the same classified ads.

The 418B is a well-regarded 15-inch Altec woofer. Its documented history runs through Ampeg's bass amp catalog and the vintage parts market, and its specifications are largely undocumented in the sources available. Altec's component-level documentation for this model hasn't turned up.

Market Value

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ALTEC 418B                                                      Nov 2026 │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ High      $395                                    Latest            $200 │
│ Median    $295                                    Trend           ▼ Down │
│ Low       $118                                    Volume           ~1/mo │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│   $400 ┤                                                                 │
│        │        .                                                        │
│        │                                                                 │
│   $271 ┤.                     .                   .                      │
│        │                                       .                         │
│        │                                                                .│
│        │                                                                 │
│   $100 ┤                                        .                        │
│        ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│    vol │█       █             █                ██ █                     █│
│        └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│         2026-03                      2026-06                      2026-10│
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

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