Altec 802B
A high-frequency compression driver that earned its reputation one hi-fi build at a time — usually bolted to an H-808 horn and sitting atop an 803A woofer.
Overview
The 802B rarely turns up as a standalone purchase. More often it arrives as part of a system — and the period literature makes that clear. In a 1953 Audio catalog listing, the 802B appears as the high-frequency unit inside Altec's 820A Corner Speaker System, paired with an H-808 multicellular horn, two 803A 15-inch low-frequency speakers, and an N-800D dividing network. That same year, a classified ad in the July issue of Audio describes a private seller offering a "800 speaker, bass 803A, treble 802B" — the driver treated as one leg of a three-part assembly rather than a component in its own right. Collectors note this is the honest way to understand the 802B: it was designed to cross over at 800 cps and hand off to a dedicated woofer, and that's how most of them were used.
What the driver actually did in service is documented better than its spec sheet. A 1955 Audio feature on a reader's home installation lists the 802B tweeter with the 808 multicellular horn as the top end of a system built around an Altec-Lansing 803A woofer, crossed at 800 cps (Audio, March 1955, p.32). The owner had been running the 802B/H-808 combination before a major system rebuild and chose to keep it — a small but telling endorsement. For a driver that was already several years into its life, that's the kind of loyalty that matters more than a frequency-response plot.
A second 1955 Audio system profile describes a comparable build: an 803A 15-inch woofer crossed at 800 cps, an 802B tweeter, and an 808 multicellular horn, this time in a cabinet patterned on the Helmholtz resonator principle rather than Altec's own enclosure. The driver shows up in both pieces as the constant — a fixed point that owners built around rather than replaced. That's consistent with the way Altec sold it: the 802B was the high-frequency half of a two-way system, and the horn it was bolted to did as much to shape its character as the driver itself.
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