Altec Lansing ALA-435 (ca. 1989)
Almost everything known about the Altec Lansing ALA-435 comes from a single group test in Audio (May 1989, p.46), where it was evaluated alongside several other car audio amplifiers of the period. It was a car amplifier, part of Altec Lansing's mid-to-late-1980s push into mobile audio. The company pursued that category alongside its better-known home and professional loudspeaker lines.
Audio's test bench found the ALA-435's frequency response off by −0.5 dB at 20 kHz at rated power output. That is a modest high-frequency roll-off, noted in the context of the group. The response curves were published as part of the review's multi-unit comparison (Fig. 1A through 1E). No absolute power rating, distortion figures, or price appeared in the surviving text, though the review placed it among amps of presumably similar output class.
That LED glowed during the turn-on delay while the amp muted itself to suppress thumps or noise from the head unit; if it stayed lit after the delay, it could indicate a fault. Beyond those details, the record is empty. No schematic, no service manual, no original price, no production run length, and no owner impressions have surfaced. The ALA-435 remains a footnote, but a real one: a car amplifier that made it onto an Audio test bench in 1989 and then quietly disappeared from the catalog.
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