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genek

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Posts posted by genek

  1. 5 hours ago, Aadams said:

    The late member @Zilch , inventor of the Econowave, had a 2ax mod that involved sawing out the upper half of the front baffle and changing the crossover to accept a wave guide and compression driver.  Those discussions are probably in kitchen.

    As I recall, Zilch was not very happy with his AR-2-based econowave and preferred Advents for his 10" projects. He did econowave a bunch of 8" AR-4s over the years though. Most of those projects were discussed at length in threads over on Audiokarma.

    Zilch did participate in this CSP discussion about replacing the AR 3/4" dome tweeter with a  waveguide, not in The Kitchen, but right here in Mods and Tweaks:

     

  2. White discoloration is moisture that has penetrated into the finish but not into the wood. Black discoloration is moisture that has penetrated through the finish into the wood fibers (iron in the water has chemically reacted with tannins in the wood). White comes off with finish removal. Black can only be removed by bleaching. You can't sand it off, because it's essentially dyed the wood fibers all the way through.

    Your best bet for sandthrough is to apply a topcoat finish rather than a penetrating one. Oil finish over touchup will never look the same as the wood, and if you oil first the oil will make the exposed particle board darker and harder to conceal. Apply a light coat of sanding sealer, followed by a first coat of varnish or lacquer, then touch up the sandthrough with paint or color sticks, toner and graining pens, followed by a second coat of varnish or lacquer. 

    You will never find one single colored cover that will be a match for your base color. Your best bet is to get a kit containing different shades and some toner, apply a lighter shade to cover and then several light applications of toner until you get a good match, then grain. 

    You must apply sealer and a first coat before touchup. You cannot touch up raw wood and get a match when a finish is applied.

     

  3. The 1974 FTC amplifier rule states that power should be rated at continuous wpc over a specified frequency range with a specified distortion. Like this "100 WPC, 20-20kHz, 0.05% THD). This seems to be widely ignored by retail advertisers (though most manuals do comply), and offhand I can't recall the last time I heard about anyone getting dinged for violating it.

  4. To clarify, the criteria is the intent to change the original sound. Otherwise, every instance of someone replacing the tweeter in an AR-3a with a HiVi QiR - or even the tweeter from an AR-11 - could push a discussion over the line.

    So for this topic, the decisive moment was:

    On 7/23/2023 at 10:40 AM, ReliaBill Engineer said:

    Well, after months of listening, I’ve decided I’m going to replace the midranges in these. They just don’t produce the level of detail I want. 

     

  5. Jab, there's no time limit. What determines whether a discussion stays here or moves to Mods, Tweaks and Upgrades is whether it's about repairing, restoring and maintaining original speakers or about redesigning them into something else.

  6. It has been well established that there are no "similar drivers" to AR woofers being produced new. Even woofers being offered as "AR replacements" don't meet the specs required to produce original performance.

    Yes, you could redesign the cabinets and crossovers to work with new drivers. You could also rip apart the spiders and voice coils of new drivers and try to rebuild them to meet original specs. But unless you are an inveterate tinkerer doing it all for fun, that's a lot of time, effort and money to avoid refoaming an old woofer.

    It'll also get your discussion moved to the Mods, Tweaks and Upgrades forum.

  7. It's always a tough trade-off, whether to expend time, money and effort to produce improvements you're not sure you'd even be able to hear. I decided a while back to hold off on rebuilding tweeters unless/until they actually stop working. What I have sounds good enough to me as it is.

  8. What you experienced is most likely a common psychoacoustic effect. You had expectations of a particular sonic improvement (much higher tweeter output), and didn't appreciate the different one you actually got until you stopped looking for the one you had expected.

    BTW, those speakers will sound considerably better if you can raise them up off the floor. 10-12 inches is good; double that would be better.

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