JVC HSW-1101-01A
A fifteen-dollar ribbon tweeter that spent 1982 being sold out of the classified ads of every hi-fi magazine in America.
Overview
Most of what's known about the JVC HSW-1101-01A comes from the back pages of Audio magazine, not from a spec sheet. It appeared month after month in the "FOR SALE" classifieds as a bare component rather than a finished product.
The classifieds give the clearest picture of pricing, and they don't agree. ACR Industries of Preston, Connecticut ran a standing ad through the fall of 1982 offering the HSW-1101-01A at $15.00 each. That price included a film crossover and freight within the USA - as printed in Audio (October 1982, p.122) and repeated in the November and December issues. A separate seller, "Something Completely Different" of Portland, Oregon, listed the same tweeter at $20.00 each in the October 1982 issue, capping the offer at 150 pieces. Whether the gap is a markup, a different batch, or just the freedom of the classified page is unclear. Treat $15 - $20 as the period range rather than a single fixed price.
The crossover is the detail that keeps coming up. ACR's ad bundles the film crossover with the driver at that fifteen-dollar figure. That's unusual for a raw tweeter sold through the mail. It suggests JVC (or at least its distributors) intended the HSW-1101-01A to be dropped into an existing system without the buyer sourcing a network separately. For a builder assembling speakers from catalog parts, that was part of the appeal.
What the HSW-1101-01A actually measured, how low it could be crossed, its impedance, its sensitivity - none of that survives in the available documentation. The classifieds name the part and its price and nothing more. It was a real, documented, repeatedly advertised ribbon tweeter, and its technical specifications are not preserved in the sources available here.
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