Girl diagnoses & solves mechanical problem


This may not be news for most of you, but it is a major news flash for me and I just had to brag at my "prowess." I EVEN USED A TORX SCREWDRIVER! I just received my Coincident Triumph Signatures yesterday and was setting them up in my small HT system. I was playing FM radio through them and they sounded OK. I went to work. Last night, I put on a couple of CDs and there was no sparkle or splash, no snap of the electric guitar notes, etc. I put my ear right up next to the tweeters and could swear there was no sound coming out of them. But this was the case w/both speakers! So I couldn't believe I was hearing right, because how could both tweeters have been blown before delivery (I bought from a reputable dealer whom I have dealt with before) or damaged during shipping? I decided to sleep on it (the problem, not the speakers). This morning, before work, I brought my ProAc Response 1SC's up from downstairs, and the guitar notes etc. all sounded right. Something was definitely wrong! I noticed some foam in the port holes in the back of the Coincidents. I tried to pull it out but it was more than just a plug and wouldn't come free. So I went downstairs to my toolbox, got out the torx wrench set my handyman brother had bought me years ago, and got the tweeter fittings unscrewed. I removed them gently (the magnets fell out into my hand) and saw immediately that the tweeters weren't even plugged in!! I reattached the lead wires to the tweeters, in both speakers, and rescrewed in the tweeter housings, and the speakers came to life (DUH!) I am sure this is not newsworthy for most of you, but if there are any other females reading this, you know how impressed I am w/myself. I can well imagine my very nonaudiophile friends and relatives, male and female, happily using these speakers for years w/no tweeters and not even noticing. Or me, several years ago, returning the speakers as damaged. i am so puffed up w/pride in myself that I am even thinking of attempting one of the DIY SET amp kits that are available. I have been eager to try out an SET and maybe I am up to soldering? Of course, I don't want to go overboard. . .
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Showing 1 response by mezmo

I love it. While we're telling college stories about outing our dumbfounding skills with sodering irons, I "inherited" a hand-me-down pair of speakers senior year only to discover that the foam on the woofers was completely destroyed. So, I figure, I'll walk myself down to Radio Shack, get some replacement drivers, and have me a new pair of speakers. What more, it worked -- and not only did I soder, I screwed. Trick is, about a week later, we threw a party. Speakers worked fine for about an hour. Then one stopped and there was nothing I could do to make it go again. And I tried. Well, we lived on the fifth floor of a walkup and we had come to the practice of merely hucking our rubbish out of the window (as long as it was done, and announced, creatively -- such as "exploding Pakistani candy" or "scented, flaming art" -- screamed as loud as you could while ejecting the item, it was ok. The uninteresting stuff was actually carried down--something about honor among scofflaws? Don't ask.). So, comes the speaker.

It fit through the window, if only barely. At the time, "Speaker!" was deemed sufficient by popular vote though, in retrospect, I suppose we could have done better. I figure my track record categorically rules me out in terms of helping anyone with speaker woes.

As a postscript, I disassembled the couch with a crowbar and put that through the window (each morsel seperately announced) at the end of the year instead of carrying it out, too. And there goes my carreer in moving....