I picked up two pairs of Altec Madrids over the weekend. One pair has the 420A's and the other has 420Y's. They look and sound the same to me. The 420's are 15 inch with a center mounted mid/tweeter cone. The ad showed Altec cabs but not the drivers so I went over hoping for 604's or 605's but that's OK.

The 420's are surprisingly good. I've heard VOTT before and thought the bass was non-existent. And, horns give me a HF headache. Both of these are non-issues with the 420. Plenty of bass and a surprisingly good mid and top end. I thought the 15 incher would drown out the smaller driver but that is not the case.

The photo is an internet shot, mine are the same.

Check out the original wiring that came out of my Madrids. It is super thin and a bottleneck. I replaced it with standard (thick) Monster wire. The sound is much more open at the top end and the bass is much less compressed, compared to before. IMO, a huge improvement for about $1 worth of wire and 30 minutes of my time.

BTW, don't waste your money on expensive boutique cables until you take a look at your speaker's internal wiring. To get the benefits of fancy cables, you have to replace everything including the internal wiring before the amp's speaker wire connector block.

I've done the same in all my speakers.
....and if we all know that only about 1% of the electrical energy sent by an amplifier to a typical speaker is converted to acoustic energy..... it's just incredible how good speaker manufact generally use thin average copper wires and bad crossover caps in their loudspeakers.

I have been chasing some distortion in one of the Madrids and it turns out the tweeter stretcher bar was out of alignment. The previous owner told me they went in for a recent re-edge job so maybe they were not re-assembled correctly. I think I've got it fixed now. I can't wait to hook all four of them up.

Finally got the fourth Madrid working right. The driver would distort inside the cabinet. When I pulled it and played it outside the cab, it was perfect. It turns out the bottom two threaded T-nuts was not properly aligned. With all four screws installed, the basket would distort shape causing the VC to rub. I left the bottom two mounting screws off. Problem solved.

Here are all four of them playing together.

Wow, looks like a lot a speaker. Couple weeks ago I helped someone with his 15" Velodyne sub. He was playing tunes one night and all hell broke loose. Rotted foam. Took the driver out for him to take in for a refoam. Got it back and had me re-install it. Played some tunes and after about 10 minutes things went south. He is an eternal pessimist and I had remarked that I wasn't sure if the original foam was on the back or front or if Velodyne tolerances are so close it would've made a difference. He continued complaining as I assessed the situation sub?, source?, pre?.... Finally decided to remove the driver. With him in my ear I started taking a really close look. Found that about 2" of dustcap was not glued together . Told him to take it back in because I did not want to void any warranty repairing it myself. He called and told me he had taken the whole unit in and they did the R&R (installed a new dustcap) then told him to let the speaker sit upside down for a day or so to let the glue really set. Well his three year old dinged the dustcap . The original was concave. Took me 20 minutes on the phone to convince him it wasn't the end of the world.

Apologies for hijacking the thread but the talk of distortion reminded me of this and how sometimes all it takes is a deep breath.

Hakka, troubleshooting my gear is stressful enough but looking at other people's gear adds a who new dimension. Bedside manners are called for.

Anyways, I'm playing a single pair of Madrid's with a 60 watt Chinese tube amp a buddy loaned me. Superb! Like thousands of other enthusiasts, I'm hooked on Altec's!!