newjerseybt

I am tired of drywall repairs. My friend had Jensen model 6 speakers in his family room. They were four ways from the mid 70s or so which contained 15" woofers. His drywall nails started peeking out in one month! Out came the drywall screws and spackle. That is the problem with 99% of installations. Everyone forgets about the room itself.

Hi Forrest Glad you like them. I was getting worried about a possible miswire. :'). I found a post of mine from 10 years ago. I commented as I looked over a second original Patrician x-over schematic which incorporated a 3500hz crossover point for a 16 ohm T-350 VHF driver. Just wanted to let you know that the 3500hz crossover for 16 ohms is comprised of a 2.84ufd non-polar cap in series with the tweeter and a .73mh coil across the tweeter. I would expect an 8 ohm crossover to be 5.68ufd for the cap and .36mh for the coil. Engineering at E.V. in 1978 told me to double the cap values and half the coils to convert to a modern 8 ohm system which makes sense. Two caps of the same value in parallel will double the microfarads while placing 2 coils of the same value in parallel will half the value. Other ElectroVoice models used a T-35 but the T-350 is touted as the better of the two drivers. If you mismatch an 8 ohm driver using an older 16 ohm tube crossover, there will be a 1 octave error on each speaker (doubling the frequency to each driver) which is why I hoped your x-overs are correct for your 8 ohm drivers. (meaning that someone might have upgraded the drivers years ago if they bought a newer 8 ohm transistorized amp as opposed to an older 16 ohm tube amplifier. (I still can't get over that you have 8 ohm drivers) I was going to modify my Patricians so I would be able to lower the grill cloth using movable metal tabs. If you listen to your Patricians without the grill cloth they will sound a full notch better like all speakers will! That is why the best systems (JBL Everest) of today do not use a grill cloth. I used a 220 RMS watt per channel amp which was biamped. I never cranked it up as I would probably cook the coils. Are your speakers placed in corners? The corners serve as the final mouth of the horn. You then place yourself inside the horn. :') In the future I will probably order a pair of Klipsch cornerhorns as they fit better in my smaller retirement home but still can loosen the drywall nails.

I knew one of the drivers was supposed to be wired out of phase. I used a old Heathkit electronic crossover to do some experimentation which I will explain in a bit. Several things I learned about the 30W. The proper distance from the corner mean't everything as to how the bass sounded. The placement was supposed to be 2.0 inches or so from the corner according to the EV bulletin. For reasons unknown to me, 6 inches worked far better for lower sounding and more powerful bass. I thought it was my ears but my buddies also noticed that 6 inches worked much better than 2 inches. Other speaker websites claimed that I was not hearing correctly but the difference was huge and was confirmed by 4 others in the room. These speakers DEMAND a corner to work or else you will have have a lot less bass. Secondly, I am assuming that the crossovers are correct for your drivers. The original ElectroVoice 12db/octave crossover for a 16 ohm system is a 9mh coil in series with a 280 mfd cap non polar across the 30W. For my 8 ohm system, I redesigned the crossover using a 4.5mh for the inductor and 560ufd nonpolar for the cap. I used an electronic bridge to wind the coil perfect as opposed to counting windings. If it were me, I would rent a bridge to confirm your coil value. But then again, I am a fanatic. ;') Finally, using my heathkit electronic crossover resulted in a huge difference over the original passive crossover. The electronic crossover was 18/db per octave which worked even better the original 12db/octave and setting the crossover point elecronically to 80 hz instead of 100 removed a very slight unwanted tone from the deep male voice improving the 30W 100%. Again, I have looked at about 6 Patrician 800 and never saw an 8 ohm version from the factory. The original schematic PDF http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CEoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Felectrovoice.com%2Fdownloadfile.php%3Ff%3DPatrician%2520800%2520EDS.pdf&ei=yVW0T-GXK8nZ6gGEwuXhDw&usg=AFQjCNFUd4YP-PUwFhqxT9TOLTOGEuaL-Qo lists the original drivers. Note the T-350 coil and cap is for a 5Khz crossover point. The later schematics are for 3500Hz which is an improvement.

Forrest, I believe the 30W is supposed to be wired 180deg out of phase with the three speakers. Check the original crossover schematic. The Klipsch cornerhorn X-over may also indicate a reversal on the 15". If the 30Ws are 180deg out of phase from each other, a loss of bass will be noticable.

Hi Woodog! Nice pics! A real professional restore! I just finished my flooring project so I had a chance to upload some photos of my homemade version of the Patrician 800 I built in 1978. My construction photos are on prints so I didn't include those but you can see the modifications that were made to make assembly easier. The cabinet volume and horn sled angles are identical to yours. Hope the following link works. http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v318/newjerseybt/

One other important point regarding amplification. Somewhere in your posts you mentioned distortion. You guessed it may be coming from noisy pots. That may be the case but...another possibilty is these Patricians will not function on what seems to be "quality" 2 channel amps or receivers. Example, I had a Marantz 4300 that would clip heavily at higher volumes on my Patricians causing a nasty "cracking sound" through all drivers. Even though my Marantz receiver was supposed to handle 4 ohm loads it could not. I experimented and placed a 2 ohm high wattage resistor in series with the speakers and it cured the problem. I then removed the resistor and switched to a high output Kenwood M2A with a high damping factor and the problem was resolved. My Kenwood amp could also handle 2 ohm loads. My 30Ws read DC resistance of about 3.8 ohms on each coil. At a very low frequency such as 30 Hz, I don't believe there is very much inductive reactance to add to the DC resistance.

I just saw your Patrician 800 post after doing a Google search and joined Klipsch.com immediately. First, I want to congratulate you on a "find of a lifetime". Properly restored, your Patrician 800s are worth $10,000 to $15,000 on the Japanese market. I built a pair of these speakers using plans I bought from ElectroVoice back in 1977 but modified the blueprints (with the help of a draftsman) considerably to make assembly easier. If you Google Patrician 800, my Patrician 800 appears to the left of the group of 5 pics (the one with the pinkish couch) and looks similar to the E.V. Traditional model . A writeup of mine accompanies the photo on another site. I looked at your photobucket pics and was very surprised to see that the drivers were 8 ohms! I NEVER saw these in 8 ohms but only in 16 Ohms. The original crossover for the 16 ohm version had a 280 MF Cap for the 30W with a 9mh coil which gave a slope of 12DB/octave. The later 30Ws did come in 8 ohms as a single driver but I never saw an 8ohm 30W installed as original equipment. One of the engineers (Bob) at E.V. back in 1977 told me I needed to redesign the 16 OHM crossovers to accomodate the 8 OHM drivers made at that time. I used EVM12Ls, 1823Ms with 8HD horns for mid highs and T-350s which were incredible tweeters! If your drivers were updated to 8 OHM to accomodate transistorized amps instead of tubes, the coil values needed to be halved while the caps needed to be doubled in size according to E.V. engineering. My cap was 560 Mfd and my coil was 4.5 mh for the 30W. It worked great but biamping was far better. Your AT38 pots do need replacing. I used Violet wirewound pots which worked great. They were available a few years ago and are much more heavy duty than what came with the original Patricians. When you reinstall the 30Ws, make sure you rotate the cone as gravity will tend to move the voice coil close to the magnet and might buzz. Do NOT loosen the magnet screws as you need a special jig to recenter that super strong magnet. I saw that special jig back in 1977. I'll bet no one has one to help you out. Good luck with your restore! Regards, Bill T.