Nice story.I am working on restoring my second pair of these wonderful speakers.
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@ticat Dude, you got a loud laugh when I read your reply! Thank you, and thank you. While more bass is always better, no Millstreet in my area and no Moosehead in cans. Besides, half the fun is the improvisation! The Molson was there and cold... @elliottbnewcombjr Exactly! And thank you for the Roger Russell citation. Lots of folks here have argued interpretations of fundamental physics of electricity and electrodynamic devices. The Rogers interpretation still works well 42+ years later. I feel that says everything that needs to be said. |
When you take things apart, the small gauge OEM wiring of equipment that built the success of so many Makers will surprise you. It is hard to resist ’good/better/best’, but you understand there is much over-doing of things, especially wire gauges. Use proper speaker wire gauge related to the length from amp to speaker (relative to the driver's impedance). Roger Russell Speaker Wire Info Combined Wire Gauge Calculator Inside, insignificant distances: crossover wire feeds a voice coil. any substantial signal will burn the coil wire, i.e. there ain’t much juice involved
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Having rebuilding many loudspeakers the Xovers is the weakest point in 90% of speakers capacitors in old speakers dry out ,your speaker needs a total rebuild ,resistors ,mills resistors or top quality path audio Millflex make excellent copper foil paper oil at decent prices , are lower cost Auricaps XO ,and inductors Jantzen make very good quality ones and for sure rewire , Neotech Teflon -6-9s Copper awg18 for the teeeter, and awg 15-14 for kids, Bass, and put copper loudspeaker terminals , VH audio WBT next gen they are only $40 each , if you are going to rebuild do it right a big step up in quality. The Xover for sure is dried out.
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Thank you @elliottbnewcombjr - your advice worked like a charm and here’s the full story with pictures! If there are any issues for anyone, the pics are on my system page as you suggested.
Like many of you, I often lust after new gear and speakers are no exception. Auditions of the Harbeth M40 and Magico S3 on a couple of occasions a decade ago convinced me that other upgrade paths existed if I ever found myself in a position that required change.
One of those change positions and a long-time worry in the back of my mind was an unrecoverable failure in my beloved Rogers Studio 1s. I purchased them in 1982 when I was in the biz and realized I couldn’t swing the B&W 801s that were my reference point at the time. The Rogers gave me 99.5% of the sound at less than half the mass, size and cost. It proved to be a very successful decision.
It is now 42 years later. Should the Rogers crossovers or woofers fail, the only available options would be to salvage operational matched pairs, retrofit with new parts or move on to something else. Given the price point of offerings like ATC SCM40, Harbeth SHL5 or M40, Magico S3 or PMC twenty5 26, moving on is not a favored option. Salvaging parts is a risky, sunk-cost alternative for products that haven’t been made since well before the turn of the century. Retrofitting is an empirical and experimental process that takes a lot of time.
A relocation last year “gifted” me with a new listening area radically different from the previous space. It’s been a gift that has been giving since November when I started trying to make it work. Many man-hours, much graph paper sketching and a copious amount of foul language later, I finally got the 2 channel, 7.2 channel, data and video systems integrated and operational.
Before the pandemic, I thought I’d heard a weakness in the right side treble. In calibrating the 7.2 system via Audyssey, I confirmed it. I had not been able to substantiate it in 2020 due to circumstances surrounding the pandemic itself. Which included packing the gear, staging the old house, selling it, moving everything, getting the new place ready, unpacking and settling in. During a pandemic. Basically, I turned the music off 4 years ago and only turned it on again in the last few days. And yes, the withdrawal symptoms were traumatic.
And found I had to confront my speaker fear. The easiest and least costly route was to purchase replacement KEF T27 tweeters from Falcon Acoustics, sold new in matched pairs. I also purchased a salvaged pair of tested Celestion HF1300 midranges off Ebay. Starting with replacing the T27s, I discovered that the acoustic foam was pretty much disintegrating. After 42 years stuffed into a box, I would have, too. Here’s a picture:
I couldn’t get replacement foam right away, so I buttoned the speakers back up and tested them again. Better, but not right. After dusting off some very old UK reviews, I discovered that because the Rogers woofers were designed to produce a very wide frequency response with plus/minus 2 dB SPL via the unique Studio 1 crossover, the Celestion drivers don’t really function as mids, but tweeters. The T27s are actually supertweeters. I sold Rogers back in the day and that was certainly not a part of our sales training on the line. And, that meant that the HF1300 was the true culprit. So, out came the soldering station again along with a can of Molson’s. Not for the reason you might expect:
The fixture worked perfectly. Must be something with that Canadian / UK connection. Anyway, the third calibration was the charm. Everything worked properly; the hyper-focused image and super-detailed presentation were all there. Two days later, the replacement foam came in and I did the messy and necessary:
A final calibration and extended listening test far exceeded my expectations for a DIY repair. All that remains is working over the external black walnut cabinet veneer to address years of sun fading and grime on the wood surface. That will be a project to show you all some other time.
While not the point of this post, I will share that I will never again install an integrated A/V system in a space I did not design myself. From beginning to (not quite) end, I’ve spent well over 160 man-hours on the project, almost all of it fooling around with work-arounds required by the electronics-unfriendly carpentry in the space itself. You can take a look at the new pics on my system page to see how it all came out. What you can’t see are all of the concrete block, ceiling support, I-beam, floor joist, and subflooring protrusions that had to be worked around.
Moral of this long story: To be an audiophile is to be a hobbyist first. You have to have a good electro-mechanical skill set, an understanding that you can’t possibly know everything, a desire to see things through and a bottomless reserve of patience. Others here have discussed the importance of building your own gear, especially speakers. I’ve built multiple Hafler kits and rebuilt several pairs of hand-me-down speakers before then. That’s what gave me a true appreciation of what I saw inside the better-quality stuff I was ultimately able to purchase in my 20s and 30s. Here I am decades later and doing it all over again. All to create more years of happy listening!
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A. post a photo (yours or any photo): 1. photo must be on the web. (I sometimes create a virtual system just to get the photo on this web site. 2. hover, right click, copy 'image address' (not copy the image) 3. top bar: 6th icon from the left, 'image' 4. paste image address, presto, it appears. B. Paste a link (give it any name) 1. copy the/any link 2. top bar, 11th icon, 'link' 3. paste link in waiting URL box 4. Give it a name in 'display text'. my 'misc info' virtual system, to get images on the web (here), then insert in a post
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