The Empire strikes back

[soundminded]

Last summer, some kind generous soul gave me a slew of old speakers he didn't want and had acquired through what may have been a lot purchase in an estate sale. Physically, most of it was scratched, a little beat up, but salvagable, much of it worked well, some needed repair or replacement and that was not his thing. He wanted it all out of his garage ASAP and rather than just put it out on the curb for the trash collector, he offered it free on the internet. He wouldn't take any money for it so I gave him a nice bottle of wine as a token gift. Anyway, among these treasures were three Empire 9000M speaker systems. He kept the marble tops for himself and I've cut three replacements out of 3/4" plywood. Now all I have to do is learn some faux marbling techniques. One required a replacement midrange/tweeter unit which I bought on e-bay for about $60 with shipping. I first tried replacing all of the crossover network capacitors but no luck, this one tweeter had a slight buzz and so wasn't good enough.

This was the most ambitious speaker Empire every built. Not actually a New England product but Garden City Long Island. It's a walnut barrel made to look like a cylindrical tambour table about two cubic feet. It has a downfiring 15" woofer which can only be described as massive, makes the 12" AR driver look like a toy. The magnet was advertised to have over 1 million lines of flux and if you lift it, you'll believe it. I always wondered how this thing would survive facing downward all those years and when I had to take one apart I found out, it's suspension is rather stiff. Interestingly, it can develop fairly deep loud undistorted bass although not nearly the equal of AR9. It achieves this by being back loaded as an infinite baffle and the front is what I would term "semi slot loaded." This makes the back loading seem considerably larger and because it radiates in 360 degrees horizontally, there is a notable absence of standing waves in the room. This makes it quite musical. The midrange and tweeter have massive magnets which are mounted on a gold plated very heavy duty sculpted aluminium casting which as is common for Empire turntabbles, is gold plated (I wonder how much cyanide they dumped into Long Island Sound over the years.) It was actually a pretty good sounding speaker but as is my usual habit, I "tweaked it." I added 3 indirect up firing 3/8" polys behind it crossed over at 6khz 6 db per octave and one forward firing 3/8" poly crossed over at 11 khz 6 db per octave. This really did the trick. I'm running it off a Sony STR G-3 HT receiver I bought on a J&R closeout about 10 or 12 years ago and never used. It's 100watts x 3 and 70 watts x 2. How do you resist a $1000 receiver for $200 brand new? Why so cheap? I don't know but perhaps its because the way you must control it, through an RF remote that is almost impossible to use and on screen commands is utter insanity. I've got them set up in my bedroom spread out uniformly over about 16 feet on a 22 foot wall with two RS 6" 2 ways burried firing indirectly when I want to use it in an HT mode (it has Dolby and some synthesized modes.) Unfortunately, one drawback of this receiver is that you can't use the center front channel without going through the HT processor and unfortunately, preamp gain could be a little higher. It doesn't seem like I'm going to need an equalizer though, the bass boost switch and the bass and treble controls seem to be all that's required to make the system sound very flat. A pleasant surprise. All that seems left is to decide what kind of marble to immitate, Carrera or Travertine or ????

[dynaco_dan]

Hi Soundminded;

A nice write-up, thank you.

[soundminded]

It's all about done except the faux marble...and some soldering and cleanup (a lot of my projects seem to exist in a jury rigged jumble of hand twisted wire connections, dangling PVC electrical tape, and jumpers with alligator clips for the longest time, it's a wonder some of them work at all.) It took another indirect tweeter for each speaker to achieve sufficiently flat hf energy transfer but surprisingly, that last one made all the difference. It's interesting how apparant the difference becomes as you keep adding them (and wondering if this is the last straw that will blow the amplifier up as the impedence at hf keeps going down), and when you get it right, all the speaker systems start sounding fairly much alike (but these will never be able to plumb the depths of deep bass possible with AR9 or original Bose 901.) More good news is that I found the on screen icon which defeats the muting switch. I've got all the gain one could want out of this receiver now and then some, it really makes you realize that with a fairly efficient speaker system 100 wpc is a lot of power, 170 wpc in the two channel mode, and the background hiss is gone too. (I'm no fan of OSP, I like to have a button or knob on a machine to push or twirl.) Also remarkably, the combination of the tweeter level switch (underneath the speakers what a pain) and the tone controls on the receiver got the system to sound surprisingly flat to my ears, it won't take much further equalization if any at all. It took fifteen 3/8" polys alone for this project. Well, my supply of polys are all gone now, all used up, the cupboard is bare. Time to call up Parts Express and reload for the next project. I should have taken advantage a couple of weeks ago when they had them on sale for $5 each.

[Guest Tucker99]

Just a thought from the 'for-what-its-worth' department and I did read that you had already cut a new plywood top but before you go to the trouble of messing with a faux-marble finish which at its very, very best will look like a faux marble top, why not try pricing out new stone tops? There will be places around you that do stone work for kitchens and bathrooms. There is all kinds of stone readily available, all colours and varying costs. They will cut and polish to size and thickness with whatever edge type you want. You can go black marbles or beige filled travertines. The stone top is simply glued on, either on top of or in place of your plywood top depending on the construction and appearance.

You've done a lot of work on those puppies ...I would submit that in the end you will be happier with the higher quality finished product of whatever stone you might select under your budget for this project that you will be with some faux paint.

Cheers