As I write, I am listening to a pair of Dynaco A-25 speakers playing classical music on my home stereo. Dynaco A-25s were among the most popular bookshelf/small floor-standing speakers of the early 1970s. By some estimates, more than a million Dynaco A-25s were sold. I see them in the homes of classical music professionals, ex-hippies with day jobs, and regular folks who never felt the need to get something newer.

Recently, Dynaco A-25s have become popular on Ebay, with a good, clean pair selling for more than they cost in the 1970s. They happen to be the speakers I had in my system in high school and college, and I happen to have recently bought a few pair with the intention of fixing them up for friends, so I thought I'd review them. They retailed for $160/pair in the 1970s, and could be had at your local stereo store for $110/pair. Today, a pair in good condition goes for $175 to $450 on ebay. A cosmetically challenged but functional pair can be had for under $100.

The Dynaco A-25 features a 10" woofer with a rubber surround. The rubber surround is significant because it does not deteriorate. Many older speakers used foam surrounds which turn to dust over time. The Dynaco A-25 also features a high quality tweeter, with a 1500 hz crossover frequency.

The speaker is about 20" tall, 11.5" wide, and 10" deep, weighing in at just over 20 lbs. each. It is finished in high quality walnut veneer, and is really pretty in a retro sort of way. Here's a picture of a decent looking pair:

http://home.indy.net/~gregdunn/dynaco/components/speakers/A25.jpg

There should also be a picture of an excellent looking pair at the top of this review.

I like them even better sans grilles:

http://home.indy.net/~gregdunn/dynaco/components/speakers/myA25.jpg

For me, one cool thing about these speakers is that you can buy a ragged looking old pair and fix them up so they look almost new. I like working with wood, and the first three pair I've worked on look really spiff. A little light sanding here, a little wood oil there, and some beautiful grain emerges from under the stains and scratches. A friend and I have even figured out how to make the cream colored grilles look good. No secrets revealed here, but it can be done.

So how do these favorites of the 1970s stack up against modern speakers?

Pretty darned well!

My reference speakers are Cambridge Soundworks Towers, among the last speakers designed by audio hall of famer Henry Kloss of AR, KLH and Advent fame. They're excellent speakers that retailed for about $1500.

For comparison, I placed the Dynacos on 18" sand-filled stands and placed them about 3 feet out from the rear wall.

My first impression was simply that the Dynacos sounded really good! Music sounded like music through them, with a relatively smooth midrange, full mid-bass, and non-screechy trebles.

I then settled in to do some work on my computer, such that I could listen as I usually do.

On classical music played at low to moderate volume levels, I often couldn't tell the Dynacos from my reference speakers. The Dynacos image pretty well and have a warm, slightly forgiving sound. The bass is full and fairly tight, and it goes surprisingly deep for moderately small speakers on stands.

When I switched to familiar CDs and cranked things up a but, I started to notice some differences between the Dynacos and my reference speakers.

On the positive side, Dynacos on stands 3' into the room actually provide a more precise image than do Cambridge Soundworks Towers placed 8" from the wall. The Towers radiate from the front and the back and generate a somewhat diffuse, though pleasing, soundstage. It's an unfair comparison, since the Dynacos were placed further out in the room (they weigh only about 20 lbs apiece and can be moved around easily), but I was impressed. Sounds bunched around the speakers less than I expected, and the soundstage was moderately deep.

The bass of the Dynacos was fairly tight and quite full; they did not sound like small speakers. But the bass was neither as tight nor as deep-sounding as that of my Cambridge Soundworks references. I'd say the Dynaco A-25s need to be near a room surface to generate the kind of bass folks talk about. Dynaco A-25s on stands two feet into a room sound warm, but plucked bass notes were a little bit on the quiet side. The upper mids and treble were smooth enough that CD hash did not drive me nuts, though I could tell that the extreme highs were down in level. The overall impression was of a straightforward, honest, speaker with no noticeable peaks or valleys, but rolled off at the frequency extremes.

On the other hand, the Cambridge Towers were a bit smoother overall. Violins sounded a bit less steely, and the sound was a bit more relaxing. Bass went deeper with the Cambridges, and the trebles were more extended. I could hear more air around instruments. Solo instruments also sound a bit more realistic with the Cambridges. Solo guitar leads on Alison Krauss's So Long So Wrong were more present and realistic, and on the Keith Jarrett Trio's Standards, Vol. 1, Jarrett's piano sounded more pure, with better attack, on the Cambridge Soundworks Towers.

On CDs and records of male vocals, like Greg Brown's The Poet Game and Gordon Lightfoot's Summer Side of Life, the Dynacos sounded really good, placing the vocalists behind the plane of the speakers and giving the vocals a nice amount of warmth. The overall effect was really pleasing. I've heard audiophile speakers that provide more pinpoint accuracy (the vocalist is RIGHT in the middle of the soundstage, way behind the speakers) but the guy sounds tiny, robbing the music of its impact. With the Dynacos, the image is maybe just a tad diffuse, but the emotional impact of the music is high.

With choral music, the Dynacos also sounded good, with the chorus sounding well integrated. Individual vocalists within a chorus could be heard, though not to the same degree as with more refined speakers.

Can the Dynacos rock? Yeah, they can! I could crank them up and they continued to sound good. In fact, the Dynacos seem to open up a bit a moderately high volume levels. However, at really high volumes things started to sound a bit confused or congested through the Dynacos relative to my larger Cambridge Soundworks Towers.

How do Dynaco A-25's compare with today's under-$500 speakers? I'd say they DO compete, though their sound is distinctively different. They do not have the same high frequency extension or detail as a contemporary $300 Monitor Audio or Polk speaker, nor is their bass as tight or their imaging as precise. But the overall effect of music through the Dynacos is just as pleasing. Their sound is warm and somewhat forgiving, and they manage to impart the emotion behind the music without calling attention to themselves.

Happily for me, since I'm constantly switching speakers these days to compare each new pair of Dynacos with my reference Cambridge Soundworks Towers, the Dynaco A-25s are fitted with relatively high quality binding posts (where the speaker wires attach, for those of you who aren't familiar with audio-speak). They are the screw down type that accept bare speaker wire, but they also accept banana plugs, which make switching speakers back and forth no problem.

Speaking of switching back and forth, I just went from one of my pair of Dynacos to my Cambridge Soundworks Towers while listening to Gordon Lightfoot's album If You Could Read My Mind. The first thing I noticed is that the Cambridge Soundworks Towers are more efficient, with the subjective volume level being louder for the same volume setting. I'd estimate the Towers at 91db/watt and the Dynacos at 89db/watt. The second thing I noticed is that the Cambridge Towers share the Dynacos' overall warmth. Gordon Lightfoot sounds full and pleasing through both speakers. Consistent with what I wrote above, fingers on plucked guitar strings were easier to hear through the Cambridge Soundworks towers, and the sense of a large acoustic space is also greater through the Towers. The Dyancos paint a smaller, more intimate picture. The Cambridge Towers are also, as I mentioned, a bit more forgiving in the high end, in spite of their greater high frequency extension. I stand by my strong recommendation of the Cambridge Soundworks Towers in the $1000 price range:

http://www.epinions.com/elec-review-1AAD-A531A33-392DA0AA-prod1

Still, I'm really impressed with the little Dynacos overall. Over the past couple of weeks, since I've been doing these comparisons, I've often been surprised by how good the Dynacos sound. Several times I've forgotten which speakers I was listening to (remember that my references retailed for $1500) and have to peek behind the Dynacos to see if they were hooked up, and not the Cambridges.

Woah! On the Columbia CD re-issue of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, the Dynacos sound utterly neutral! I'm operating with my Cambridge Soundworks BassCube 12 going and the Dynacos about 20" into the room as I write (I moved them back since I started this review, so I wouldn't be tripping over speaker wires), and the sound is fantastic. Miles's horn is behind the plane of the speakers and sounds like the real thing. The cymbals may be a bit down in level, but they sound real. Coltrane's sax just sounds right, neither too bright nor too mellow. This is incredible! I have no desire to switch to my Cambridges. I'm just going to close out this paragraph and listen to the music.

Dynaco A-25s were made (in Denmark) from roughly 1969 through 1975, and over that time, several slightly different versions of the speaker were made, though the model number remained the same. I believe earlier versions were made with Scanspeak drivers, while later versions were made with Seas drivers. In some early versions, the damped port is above the tweeter. In most A-25s, it is below the woofer (with the tweeter on the top; see the second picture, above). All of the A-25s in my possession have five position tweeter switches on the back (some, I am told, have three position switches), and they really do affect the sound. You can go from mellow to almost too bright with a few clicks. I generally use the middle setting.

A later (mid-'70s) version of the Dynaco A-25, called the A-25XL, is said to be 3 db more efficient and to be more extended in the extreme high frequencies, but I have never heard this version.

A good discussion of the history of Dynaco speakers can be found at this website:

http://home.indy.net/~gregdunn/dynaco/components/speakers/

How can one come with a pair of Dynaco A-25s? As I mentioned, they have recently become fashionable on Ebay, and there are always several pair up for sale there. I also scored one pair in pretty good condition using Craigslist. If you're good at working with wood, you can try to find a nasty looking but good sounding pair for about $100. Fix 'em up, uncork a bottle of a nice Cabernet, and enjoy the moment that you oil them and see the grain in all its glory for the first time. Some have merely nice grain; others have utterly gorgeous grain!

If you want a pair that's already pretty, expect to pay between $175 and $450, depending on condition of the enclosure, beauty of the real wood grain, condition of the cloth screen, and presence or absence or the cool little screw-in Dynaco tags that came with the speakers in the '70s.

For the best sound, I'd recommend putting the Dynacos on 18" stands and placing them a foot to three feet away from the back wall. To beef up the deep bass, I might add a Cambridge Soundworks BassCube 10 or 12, two cost-effective subwoofers that are relatively easy to find. But most people will probably place the Dynacos on shelves, leading to poorer imaging but beefing up the bass, due to reinforcement from the nearby wall. They sound quite good in either set up.

In fact, I just set up a system for a friend that may reflect how Dynaco A-25 will most often be used more accurately than what I've written about above. She has the speakers on the floor beneath her secondary desk. The receiver is a Marantz 2230, and the CD player is an old one that she pulled out of the garage. Under these less-than-ideal circumstances the system sounds...great! Imaging isn't an issue, but voices sound warm, instruments sound realistic, and bass is surprisingly deep! She's...how shall I say it...like totally stoked!

To conclude, if you are putting together an inexpensive (or retro) stereo system, I'd recommend trying to find a pair of Dynaco A-25s to listen to. Pair them with an early '70s Marantz or Sherwood receiver (also available on Ebay), or maybe an NAD from the '80s, and you'll have the backbone of a really good system for $300 or so. Add an inexpensive CD player and you're ready to roll. To recap, Dynaco A-25s are NOT high definition modern "audiophile" speakers. The are warm, slightly forgiving speakers that look really nice and sound good.

I really am having too much fun fixing these things up and listening to each pair as I get them!

May 2012 Update: After all these years of reading about how great Dynaco A-25s sound with tubes, but listening only with solid state, I finally got to hear Dynaco A-25s through a tube amplifier.  A friend asked me to test out his Fisher X-100B 17 watt/channel tube amplifier from the 1960s, and I was able to get the thing working using only De-oxit (pretty much the limit of my technical expertise when it comes to restoring tube gear). The sound of the X-100B with Dynaco A-25s is absolutely wonderful. It's relaxing, three-dimensional, and detailed. What they say is true: Dynacos and tubes are a magical combination. Using my M&K subwoofer to augment the bass, I prefer the sound of the Dynacos to the sound of my AR-3as and DCM Time Windows with the Fisher X-100B amplifier.  For the record, the Fisher uses 7868 output tubes. I look forward to trying the Dynacos with other tube gear as well. 


-----






Key word experiment: Dynaco A25 Dynaco A-25 speaker Dynaco A-25 speaker review Epinions (folks have reported to me that they have a hard time finding this review using Epinions's search engine or Google)

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 100