Altec Lansing 306A
The Altec Lansing 306A is an AM-FM tuner from the mid-1950s, when Altec was taking its professional theater and studio engineering and building home high-fidelity components with it. Almost everything that survives on it comes from contemporary audio magazines. No service manual, schematic, or production figures are known to exist in collector channels today.
Audio (December 1957, p.53) called the 306A "the most sensitive tuner ever tested," and Altec adopted the phrase in its own promotional materials. The FM section has a six-gang tuning condenser, fully shielded and mounted directly to the chassis. It also has a Foster-Seeley (Armstrong) detector, a cascode low-noise RF stage, a triode low-noise mixer, automatic frequency control, and two limiter stages. The AM section uses three IF transformers. The same review praised the tuner's "sharp selectivity" and "exceptional sensitivity."
Altec put a lot of weight on construction precision. The company argued that a half-inch of wire in the wrong place could seriously affect a tuner's performance, and the 306A was built to exacting standards because of it. A dry rectifier promised long stable life. The layout isolated the transformers completely from the power mains and easily met FCC radiation requirements.
Beyond these period reviews, little is documented about the 306A. Its place in Altec's broader tuner lineup and its total production run are unrecorded.
- Type: AM-FM tuner
- FM Antenna: 300 ohm standard
- Maximum Sensitivity: 1.1 µV
- Quieting Sensitivity: 2.5 µV (20 dB), 4.0 µV (30 dB)
- Selectivity: 185 kHz at 6 dB, 300 kHz at 20 dB
- FM Detector: Foster-Seeley (Armstrong)
- RF Stage: Cascode low-noise
- Mixer: Triode low-noise
- Limiter Stages: 2
- AFC: Yes
- Tuning Condenser: 6-gang, fully shielded
Similar items on eBay
No exact Altec Lansing 306A listings are live right now — these searches show current Altec and similar vintage audio gear on eBay:
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.
Related Models
- Altec 1803B
- Altec 23746 (1975)
- Altec 26421 (1975)
- Altec 288-16G
- Altec 288-8H/16H
- Braun AUDIO-1 (1965)
- Braun AUDIO-250 (1965)
- Magnavox Component Systems (1972)
- Acoustic Research AR (1967-1976)
- Acoustic Research 11