Altec A7-500W
The theatre speaker in a dress: Altec's "Magnificent," the A7-500W gave a Voice of the Theatre system a hand-fitted walnut cabinet and asked $498 for the privilege.
Overview
The A7-500W is what happens when Altec takes its A7-500 "Voice of the Theatre" system — the horn-loaded monitor that became the standard in broadcast and recording studios — and puts the whole assembly into a furniture-grade dress housing. According to Altec's own 1966 advertising, the result was marketed as the "Magnifirent," and the company was blunt about its purpose: the A7-500 by itself was fine for monitoring or for hiding behind a screen or grille cloth, but it was "hardly suitable in the average living room." The W suffix was the living-room fix. High Fidelity (April 1966, p.35) ran the same copy with its own framing: three speakers "alike in beauty and dignity," with carved fretwork façades and "lustrous grain of hand-rubbed walnut," aimed at "wives who won't compromise on décor and husbands who won't settle for less than the best speaker system anywhere." Marketing, yes — but it tells you exactly who the cabinet was for.
The price of admission was $498 in the mid-1960s, and that was the furniture-finish figure. The crossover network is packaged in a metal housing and fitted with a high-frequency attenuator adjustable in 1½-dB steps up to 6 dB — a control Audio (January 1967, p.34) described as necessary precisely because the horn driver's efficiency runs ahead of the woofer's. The network's slope is 12 dB per octave beyond the crossover frequency.
On the top end, Audio (January 1967, p.34) reported usable output up to 22 kHz from the A7-500 assembly, with reproduction "relatively smooth throughout the range of the h.f. unit" — a useful counter to the assumption that a theatre-derived horn system rolls off early. At the bottom, the same review found no doubling down to 30 Hz but "plenty of sound output even below that." The overall character was summarized as "gutsy," with solid bass and smooth mid and high ranges. That is the A7 sound in a sentence: efficient, dynamic, and built to be heard, not to disappear into a bookshelf. Altec's advertising made the same point with less diplomacy — bookshelves are for holding books.
The A7-500W's place in the Altec catalog is worth understanding because it shapes what shows up on the used market today. The company sold the A7-500 as a monitor, the A7-500W in the full furniture cabinet, and the Valencia 846A as a smaller full-size home system using the same components as the A-7 "Voice of the Theatre" — $333 in the same 1966 advertising, with the Seville 847A below it at $231. Collectors chasing the W are buying the cabinet as much as the driver complement, and cabinets are the part that suffers: a hand-fitted walnut housing that has spent fifty-odd years in a living room has usually spent some of them near a radiator, a window, or a cat. Buyers should expect to inspect veneer and fretwork closely, and to check the high-frequency attenuator, which is the one user-facing control on the whole system. The horn-inside-cabinet arrangement also means service access is not a casual proposition compared to the bare A7-500.
The A7-500W is not a subtle speaker, and no one at Altec pretended otherwise. Audio's 1967 review closed with the honest caveat: if your home has the space for a pair and the budget can accommodate their cost, they are well worth considering. The "if" is doing a lot of work. These are large, heavy, highly efficient systems that reward a big room and punish a small one — the dress housing solves the visual problem, not the acoustic one. For collectors, that is the whole appeal: a piece of studio history that Altec was willing to finish for the home, priced and sold as furniture, and still possessed of the same gutsy, theatre-quality sound that made the A7 a standard in the first place.
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