T.H.E. Droid

Kind of crude, but why not simply run the low beam wire(s) back through a switch? (or a switched relay if you want to avoid loss in the extra wires)

On another thread I listed my speakers in order of my preference. I don't necessarily rate them by ability to go loud as much as overall sound quality, clarity, and ease of getting set up in different rooms: 1. Thiel CS1.6. These are my favorites which I can drive with either a Cambridge Audio Azure integrated amp or a rebuilt Scottkit LK48. They are very tolerant of the room and setup and although it's not a speaker that can play at earthshaking levels, it has an amazingly full range punch and an astonishingly good sound stage. 2. JBL Summit L300's. These are my audio system in the family room and are driven by an ADCOM 5500 amp and Linn preamp. While similar in configuration to my Klipsch Cornwall 1's, they trump them in every way and are just as easy to setup and forgiving of room characteristics. 3. Klipsch Cornwall 1's. Mine have Crites-rebuilt crossovers and are otherwise stock. Clean, punchy and easy to set up, but the tweeters IMO are no match for the JBL tweeters. Ironically, I also used the LK48 with these speakers and found it couldn't produce enough power at higher levels. 4. Klipsch Horns. Mine are 1980's vintage with crites a/4500 crossover and tweeters. I found the low frequency crossover circuit on the crites crossover to be too sloppy and ruined the high bass, so I reverted them to the original Klipsch 2nd order low pass filters that came in the speakers. (Crites tweeters and mid/hf crossovers are great though, and made a big improvement. These speakers were originally in the room where the thiels are now. They honestly never sounded good there, trying several different corner combinations and furniture arrangements. Then they were tried in the family room, where the JBL Summits are. They worked a bit better there, but still nowhere near the overall performance of the Summits. Now they are out in my garage, where they seem to be the happiest. Sorry to say it, but they are so sensitive to the room they are placed in it can become difficult to get them to sound good no matter what you do. Frankly, if I'd owned the Thiels before I bought the Khorns, I would never have bought the Khorns. That's not to say that if you have the right room for them, they don't sound awsome. But in the wrong room, they are rubbish. 5. Klipsch Heresy 1's. Can's say enough good things about this speaker. It's easy to set up. sounds good (although anemic in the bass) and can take a lot of amplifier. However, I think Klipsch would have been smarter to make a ported version of it to improve the bass output. I suspect they didn't because they didn't want to compete their own Cornwall model.

If the shroud and end cap are castings, most likely this is an example of pot metal decay, which is very common. Pot metal is sensitive to humidity and moisture and I've even seen it self-destruct all by itself. If the shroud is sheet metal and the cap a casting, it could be an example of galvanic corrosion caused by the proximity of two dissimilar metals. It may also be a reaction between the paint, the metal underneath, and moisture. Even though it is buried inside the woofer box, moisture can still get in through the cone. Does the bass cab look like it was ever exposed to water on the bottom?

As with any vintage hifi equipment, you can't make such a statement. I paid $550 for my Summits and they are in as good or better shape than most seen on ebay, although as I mentioned the woofers were replace. We've all seen countless examples of good speakers selling at the lower end of the range, but patience is necessary. As for being in the same league, I believe the original idea was to find out which JBL speaker is most similar in configuration and performance to the Cornwalls. Your premise is rediculous since current production Cornwall III's cost $4000, more than double what you typically pay for the Summits.

As Nectar states, the closest I've found is the L300 Summit. Main overall difference is the Summit's larger and heavier-built cabinet and the mid and tweeter horns are different bypes, but the overall configuration is that same. I have both Cornwalls and Summits. I only paid $200 for the Cornwalls (which required a few hundred more in repairs and crossover rebuilds) and $550 for the Summits, which is an extreme bargain as they typically sell for $2K-$3K. Down side is that the doofus who owned them installed peavy bass drivers rather than repairing the foam surrounds that typicall fail in these speakers, and then tossed the valuable JBL bass drivers. (which are worth more than I paid him for the speakers.) I don't have the original drivers to compare, but I have no complaint about the Peavy drivers, they seem to work well. In operation, the Summits are clearly superior to the Cornwalls in every way, which is saying something since the Cornwalls are such good speakers. I think the character and quality of the midrange is similar in both speakers, but the JBL tweeter is far superior to the Cornwall tweeter, and bass is lower and punchier. The JBL also included mid and high balance controls, which makes it easy to set up the speaker to personal listening levels. I had to add a parametric equalizer to balance the Cornwalls. Appearance wise, the Summit has a glass top, a lower, squarer cabinet on a riser, and dark wood panels on the side with curved edges. They are quite heavy and the square footprint and glass top is nice as a place to put equipment without getting feedback. (except turntables, of course.) If I was asked to rank my speakers in sound quality, this would be my opinion: 1. Thiel CS1.6 2. JBL Summit L300 3. Klipschorns 4. Klipsch Cornwalls 5. Klipsch Heresy

You never mentioned if these were originally veneered or bare plywood. If they are painted over veneer, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by applying heat to soften the contact cement on the veneer and pull the old veneer off. You can clean up any rough glue spots with newspaper and an iron (which helps pull off glue deposits) and then lacquer thinnner. (careful- lacquer thinner is flammable and has pretty strong fumes. ) You'll want to patch any soft spots or chipped out plywood areas and then re-veneer. If the speakers are painted plywood, how you proceed depends on what they were painted with in the first place. Household latex paint yields well to a paint heat gun and scraper. Enamel paints (like many sprays) can be tougher and you'll probably need to sand. If you're sanding, assume the paint might have lead in it and use a dust mask and keep the dust from getting around your home. Strippers don't work on all kinds of paint so you need to test if first, and watch out for the fumes. Some are particularly toxic. If you are going to veneer, you really don't need to remove all the paint, just get a good smooth surface and repair any bumps and gouges in the plywood.

My TD 125-II with grado cart is nice and quiet. (or was until I managed to destroy the motor, so now it is out of service.) Turntable weak spot is the cable system. The output is very small and any cable problems can cause quite a bit of noise. Also, the TD 125 motor/electronics design can create some noise if there are any bad grounds or cable problems.

That's a great analogy. How many times have you seen hapless motorheads who sink $50,000 into restoring a car that will never be worth more than a fraction of that? There is a small subset of vintage hifi gear that has intense collector interest, but for the average user, common sense restoration will restore the item to optimum performance, and in some cases, even a bit better than the original performance.

Given what passes for music these days, I suspect that concertgoers are lucky to get a rehearsed, edited recorded performance with the singer at least gyrating in front of them. I had the misfortune to go to a Doors concert and I only wish Jim Morrison had been lip syncing. As bad as he sounded on Doors records, he was infinitely worse in person. I can only speculate that he sold his soul to the devil and his success had something to do with demonic intervention. The actual music and performances shouldn't have carried him any farther than the local bowling alley.

You can learn from Craig's example-- Real electronics people like Craig and Bob Crites know that these "audiopile" products are not magic and must follow the same laws of physics that apply to all electronic components. When you see products that have much higher prices and vague but fantastic claims, you can be pretty sure that the sellers are frauds and crooks, which seems to be epidemic in the audio industry these days.

Already deleted.

For a new player, I can recommend the Harman Kardon HD990. It has balanced outputs if you can use them, and has digital (optical and coax) inputs so you can use the player's high-quality D/A system for other digital sources. I tried hooking my older Sony 400-disk player to the digital inputs and in parallel to my preamp, and I can clearly hear the improvement in sound quality between the HK's D/A system and Sony's. I got my player refurbished through HK's factory store on their web site for a substantial discount and I've seen them through Amazon at good prices. I wasn't able to locate anything else in the $400-$600 range that could match the specs. For less money, I've also been impressed with Adcom CD players on the used market. Some of the Adcoms have variable volume outputs which, with the attending remote, allow remote volume control with vintage amps.

Ah, I'm an old enough geezer to remember it as Allied Radio, and also the Heathkit store here in the Detroit area, the Lafayette Electronics stores (actually worked there one summer selling stereos) and building some heath electronics kits.

Looks like the auction ended at a bit over $33,000, which seems a bit absurd to me. The Paragon series comes from a day when consoles were the rage. I certainly consider it to be a work of art from an industrial design standpoint, but the console design makes it a very limited speaker and JBL certainly was able to produce some better components later in its history. Since plans are available, I'd think any good cabinet maker could produce something in much more interesting woods and you could get more performance out of modern drivers. However, esthetics aside, I think there are a number of coherent designs on the market that will substantially outperform the paragons in every way, including snob appeal.

I That's probably too high. If it was the GFA 5500 and an Adcom preamp with both phono input AND a remote control, you'd be more in the ballpark of $600.

I guess it probably depends on the quality of the transport and what's going on inside. Typically both coax and optical feeds from a CD will be 44.1Khz PCM signal but one of the devices could be having problems and experiencing high bit rate, jitter or other errors. Errors can be masked by the player, usually through interpolation where missing bit values are "guessed" by looking at the two adjacent bits. Since neither of your players are designed to play primarily CD's, there could be a lot of compromises made that you are hearing. You might be surprised at an even bigger improvement in sound by going to a good dedicated CD player.

Yes, already beaten to death last month. As for the Alan Parsons article, a few quotes from him sum things up well: I don't listen to much music recreationally - it's almost always for professional applications. I do listen in the car, but that's about it.....I'm simply not very familiar with the latest domestic hi-fi equipment. I would say that means that A.P. is not a person with A Valid Path of advice for audiophiles.

Seems pretty obvious that you've got a shipping damage issue at best, or at worst, an outright attempt to scam you. The best defense is to always attempt to be reasonable. If the buyer claims something that had to happen in shipping, it's reasonable for them to get in touch with the shipper and make a claim. If they refuse, that's an obvious sign of a scam. So is refusing to provide photos to you and ebay/paypal of the shipping container and amp. Another sign of a scam is any mismatch between account addresses and sudden unusual buying activity. Often this involves phishing emails and a hijacked account. In the future, take a few pages from someone who sold a LOT of expensive stuff on ebay and never got ripped off....... 1. NEVER ship until a payment has been received IN YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. Would you sell to someone you don't know face-to-face and take a personal check? Of course not. Shipping before payment has cleared into your bank account is the same thing. 2. NEVER leave money in paypal. If they don't have it in your paypal account, they can't play their games. Remember paypal is not a bank and is not required to play by the same rules. 3. Always pack carefully AND take photos when expensive items are involved. I think, in general, ebay and paypal (which are the same company I believe) are very aware of scamming and the techniques involved and will recognize a scam attempt. 4. Never ship anywhere but the confirmed Paypal address. People who wanted something shipped elsewhere had to convince me and were not allowed to pay with paypal, but had to pay with cash (like a western union transfer) or Postal Money Order. (that can be cashed at the post office.)

Heresy's are very easy to drive so just about anything will do. If you are not using them with a subwoofer, you'll want something that allows you to EQ the main speakers separately to get better bass response. Having around 100wpc for the mains should be more than enough. That brings in a lot of choices from makers like HK, Pioneer, Yamaha, and many others. The only brand I'd avoid is Sony, which I've found to no longer make reliable equipment.

I think you'd get a far better system eliminating such a monstrous mish-mash of miss-matched speakers and have a competent home theater engineer design you an engineered system that addresses all the problems associated with multiple speaker systems and room interactions.

I keep my old wire trimmings and use the stripped off insulation-- just slide it over the wires. Often you can get good chunks of old automotive wire harness for very cheap at a junkyard. Hekuva lot cheaper than shrink tubing.

As long as you can make concurrent connections (switchboard style) put a dummy resistive load on one speaker output set and switch that into the idling amp circuit. Although I'm not sure why an idling amp with no output needs a load. Effectively leaving it without a discrete load is the same as giving it an infinite load. Use high wattage sand or wirewound 8 ohm resistors.

So what everyone is trying to say is that changing caps doesn't affect the bass, but it does affect your perception of the strength and quality of the bass by changing the higher frequencies. I agree 100%. When setting up some multi-amped systems back in the old days, the bass systems never really had their "oomph" until the mid and high drivers were brought online. (Despite being operated at exactly the same levels and frequency range.)

Actually I'm well aware of it, and the only one who seems to be espousing any ignorance of the facts is the one hurling the insults. Note the details about having a custom crossover built. But who cares about facts, right Droid? I've been dealing with naysayers and 'experts' for over a decade now. Gee Empire ! It looks as though you have come to the wrong place to get your pats on the back for what you have thrown together while claiming they are the best sounding Belles on the planet ! Indeed. I suspect we'll see them listed on ebay for a few years at $10K with no takers.

We also didn't go into what happens when you start adding drivers to an existing crossover network. I guess what you've done to the speakers shows you don't really have a clue as to how speakers work, and that seems to work in your favor in this case. Glad you like them.