Actually, no. The replacement drivers looked exactly like the originals. The improvement was internal, and mostly with the glue! This is the complete story, that I was hoping to avoid telling.

When moving into my first house, in '88, I had carefully boxed up the Allison 3's in their original cartons. The movers must have been less than gentle with handling them, however, as I discovered later. After I was able to hook up the stereo, one of the speakers sounded very wrong. Removing the grill, which wasn't damaged, I saw the paper of the mid-range driver had separated from the magnet! That was when I visited Allison Acoustics, conveniently located not far from where I worked. I explained to Roy what happened, who said some early production runs had a glue problem, and that he was using a different process, along with other refinements he had made. He suggested that a new mid-range wouldn't be a perfect sonic match for the 10-year-old driver in my other speaker, so I bought two replacement units from the same production run. Replacing just the failed unit at first, I could hear immediately that Roy was right about the difference in sound. The then-new drivers sounded a bit more forward, especially with vocals.
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