Acoustic Research, Inc. ("AR") was founded in 1954 by
audio pioneer, writer, inventor, researcher and audio-electronics teacher
Edgar Villchur and his student,
Henry Kloss. AR was established to produce the
US$185 () model AR-1, a loudspeaker design incorporating the acoustic suspension principle based on , granted to Edgar Villchur and assigned to Acoustic Research in 1956. Edgar Villchur's technical innovation was based on
objective testing and research, most of which was made publicly available as documents, specifications, and measurements—all of which were then new in the loudspeaker industry. Acoustic Research, as an employer, claimed
equal opportunity and offered liberal
employee benefits,
insurance, and
profit sharing to its employees.
Acoustic suspension loudspeaker The acoustic suspension woofer provided an elegant solution to the age-old problem of bass distortion in loudspeakers caused by non-linear, mechanical suspensions in conventional loudspeakers. The existing state-of-the-art at the time of AR's invention was the
bass reflex speaker, which boosted bass response for a given amount of cone travel by directing sound energy from the rear of the speaker cone through a port in the cabinet "tuned" for reinforcement of the direct signal from the front of the cone by the signal from the rear of the cone. Among the drawbacks of bass reflex design are the stringent design parameters required for accurate bass reinforcement, requiring high precision and, at the time, large cabinets. Some loss of accuracy ("smearing" or "vooming" of low frequencies) was inevitable, and the results were not entirely predictable. Extensive
prototyping drove up the development costs of new designs, pushing them out of popular price ranges. High-fidelity woofers were vulnerable to damage from extreme low-frequency signals. Those issues were addressed with the invention of the acoustic suspension woofer. The acoustic suspension woofer (sometimes known as "air suspension") used the elasticity of air within a small, sealed enclosure of about to provide the restoring force for the woofer cone. The entrapped air of the sealed-loudspeaker enclosure, unlike the mechanical springs of conventional speakers, provided an almost linear spring for the woofer's diaphragm, enabling it to move back and forth large distances ("excursion") in a linear fashion, a requirement for the reproduction of deep bass tones. The disadvantage of this arrangement is low efficiency. Since the restoring force is large with a large woofer in a small cabinet, the cone must be massive to keep the resonant frequency in the required low bass region. The AR-1s were about 10 percent as efficient as other (physically much larger) existing speakers with equivalent bass response, but since higher power amplifiers were becoming available about the same time, this was a reasonable trade-off to get good bass response from a relatively small speaker. The AR-1 set new standards for low-frequency performance and low distortion that were unsurpassed for many years. Some of the best loudspeakers available fifty years later continue to use the acoustic suspension principle for high-quality, low-distortion bass reproduction. The small size of the high-performance AR-1 permitted by the acoustic suspension design helped usher in the age of stereophonic sound reproduction. Two bookshelf-sized loudspeakers were far more acceptable in a living room than the two refrigerator-sized boxes previously necessary to reproduce low-frequency bass notes. By March 1957, AR began shipping a smaller, less expensive acoustic suspension system, the
US$87 () Model AR-2. The AR-2 was selected by
Consumer Reports as a "Best Buy," and the company's sales went from $383,000 in 1956 to nearly $1,000,000 by the end of 1957. Also that year, co-founder and Vice President
Henry Kloss left AR to form a new loudspeaker company,
KLH. ==AR-3 loudspeaker==