Not sure if this is better suited for Cafe Society, since the product is audio equipment. The equipment is a pair of JBL L-100 speakers that kaylasmom owned when I met her 46 years ago. I’m not precisely sure when she bought them, but I’m guessing 1974 as a plausible early limit (I think that’s when she first started gigging at clubs an earning money that didn’t come from her SSI).
Anyway, the SNs are 268203A and 268206A. I’m unlikely to ever use them again, and I’m thinking of trying to sell them. Being able to provide a time frame for their manufacture strikes me as a desirable piece of data.
TIA (and Chronos and e_c_g, please accept my apology if I selected the wrong forum).
Thanks for that, running_coach. Interesting article. What’s really intriguing is that it mentions the existence of a pro version of the model. The photo of the author’s speaker shows the word Century below the model number on the nameplate, and mine do not bear that rubric. Kaylasmom had always said that they were professional-grade studio monitors, and I think maybe this might be a sign that they’re not run-of-the-mill consumer electronics.
Not sure if the following is possible, but here’s a link - Speaker Codes & Applications – Weber Speakers to a website that may allow you to identify the date of manufacture of the actual speakers used in the JBL speaker cabinets. If you can find a serial number on the speaker cones and the Weber website returns a hit, then you will at least know the earliest possible date of manufacture.
The other possibility is this site: JBL CATALOGS which seems to list both home and pro JBL speakers from around the time you suspect they were purchased.
It’s an extremely obscure factual question, to which you may have a hard time getting an answer, but it is a factual question, and sometimes it seems like the obscure questions are the ones Dopers are best at. Good luck.
I took a look at the JBL Catalogues site that I linked to above and found this: 1973 L100 CENTURY
On the third page, it says that the L100 Century was a modified version of the Model 4310 studio control room monitor, introduced when JBL found that recording engineers and others were buying the 4310 for their personal use. There is no actual date on the document but at the bottom of the last page is a reference number SB100/73 which suggests it was printed in 1973.
This still doesn’t tell @kaylasdad99 when the set you have was manufactured, but you could compare the specs on the last page to see how closely your speakers match.