Altec Lansing 9813 (1981–ca. 1982)
Little is documented about the Altec Lansing 9813 beyond its run of professional-audio advertising in the early 1980s. The surviving record is almost entirely promotional - a handful of magazine announcements and spec snippets. It still sketches a serious studio monitor.
What Recording-Engineer (April 1981, p.163) called a “high-accuracy recording monitor” was introduced with a lot of fanfare. The ads touted a brand-new crossover network design that was already being reviewed for a patent. They described the 9813 as a monitor that “handles power extremely well,” with mids and highs adjustable “through very wide amplitude.” The same campaign ran in DB-Magazine through mid-1982 and insisted that “accuracy need not be unpleasant.”
A brief listing in Mix-Magazine (November 1981, p.84) gives the only hard physical spec found. The 9813 weighed 15 pounds, with a shipping weight of 17½ pounds. That is modest for a pro monitor of the era and suggests a compact cabinet, likely two-way. Driver complement, crossover frequency and cabinet dimensions are undocumented. The same issue of Mix (p.39) carried a short item on a new Altec Lansing compression driver that used a lead-zirconate-titanate (LZT) semiconductor element to “convert electrical signals directly into sound motion,” with no magnet or voice coil. Whether this experimental driver was used in the 9813 is unclear. The timing and the monitor’s “high accuracy” billing make it at least plausible that the 9813 was the platform for that technology.
No production run length, original price, or sales figures survive. No owner manuals, service literature, or user reviews have turned up. The 9813 remains a faint but intriguing blip in Altec’s professional line — a monitor that promised a new kind of accuracy, then vanished with almost no trace.
- Type: Studio monitor loudspeaker
- Weight: 15 lb (shipping 17.5 lb)
- Known features: Patent-pending crossover network; wide-range mid/high adjustment; possible LZT compression driver
- Period advertising: Recording-Engineer (Apr 1981), DB-Magazine (Jul 1981, Aug 1982, May 1982), Mix-Magazine (Nov 1981)
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