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Altec Lansing, together with Rotel, was our most important brand, business-wise. As we continued to strive for an ever better inventory to offer our customers, we skirted by Infinity - but got stuck with Altec Lansing. Altec, which is the brand name it is best known by in the U.S., was established before the second world war by a group of sound engineers that dropped out of Western Electric, the supplier of commercial sound to all applications - particularly the movie industry. Then as now, much of the innovation of sound reproduction was developed there. Situated in Hollywood they took up the competion with their former employers.
One of the early contributors to Altec's success was a gentleman by the name James B. Lansing - of JBL fame. From there stems the constant haggling between Altec and JBL as of the right to use the Lansing name for marketing purposes. In our time a court decision stated that this right belonged to Altec. While we also were involved in this discussion - JBL was out fiercest competitor on high-quality sound, this was played down as we better learnt what Altec stood for.
The Altec distribution was divided into two major categories: Commercial and consumer. The product range spilled over a little so many of the products offered to us, as consumer distributors in Norway, were actually in the Professional (commercial) range. Mainly the driver units in their more expensive home models: Barcelona, Valencia and Santiago.These had some beautiful cabinets. Later came modell 19. These high-sensitivy speaker cabinets, and the 604 Super Duplex, we sold quite a few of. Arnfinn even made building drawings for the modell 17 (604) cabinets.
However, the main turnover was in the Bookshelf Series. This was a nicely balanced speaker series - designated 1-9. (1, 3, 5, 7 and 9) These speaker both had good efficiency as well as good power handling capacity. Models 1 and 3 were 2-way systems, the others were 3-way. Model 3 was particularly successful, being well-priced and with the highest efficiency. At the end of their production run a "Series II" was introduced. This one sounded extremely nice, getting rid of a certain degree of boominess that sometimes plagued the modell 3.
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