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Tweeter issue on an AR3....


lakecat

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Just finished the crossover on the 3 and checked tweeter and mid before I installed woofer. They played fine and the pots worked okay. These pots are the old ones with the little spring in them. Anyways......I installed woofer and hooked it up. The tweeter is not playing at all now and some of the sound comes out of the woofer. The mid works fine and adjusts with the pot turned.

Has anyone ever had this issue? I am including pic of crossover. I am at a loss of what to do. Thanks...

IMG_3664.JPG

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I'd work backwards through the audio chain from the tweeter, using, say,
a tone from a computer or headphone output from a portable radio until I
stopped getting sound.

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My guess is everything is working, but it's confusing when all three drivers are engaged. To simplify and be really able to listen, remove the strap between T and 2.  Then connect your amp to T and 1.

Power up your amp and get some music with cymbals (possibly a jazz trio). Now listen closely to your tweeter through a toilet paper tube. These tweeters don't put out much SPL, so you need that tube to be able to hear them.  Also make sure your tweeter pot is full ON. Just for the record, I removed the tweeter pot entirely from the circuit in my AR's and it still didn't make the speakers as bright as my AR TSW's.

You should also connect your amp to 2 and 1, just to make sure your woofer is working properly.

 

Regards,

Jerry

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I know this will sound weird but before I started taking woofer out and testing everything......I thought I would try it again. The speaker had not moved and same amp. I turn it on.....and the tweeter was playing!...lol. I even got the paper towel tube I was using yesterday....and yep...nice sound was coming thru the tweeter.....crazy. 

I adjusted pots and they worked...so tweeter set full on and mid at three-quarters. I have been playing it most of the afternoon and it sounds great. Thank you speaker gods.....;)

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5 hours ago, Carlspeak said:

I took a poll some years back asking how AR3 and 3a owners had their pots set. Lakecat's settings are pretty much consistent with what I found in 10 or so responses. Tweeter pot full on and mid, 1/2 - 3/4. 

Good argument for bypassing the tweeter pot.

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It is important that RoyC continues to emphasize the point that the circuit resistance is necessary for the tweeter (or mid), but I suspect that owlsplace understands that using that "bypass" verb is something of a misnomer which can easily be misconstrued if not described with additional detailed procedures for circuit modification to account for this necessary resistance.

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On Sunday, November 20, 2016 at 2:52 PM, owlsplace said:

Good argument for bypassing the tweeter pot.

Yes, but that only gets you one db more out of the tweeter.  It's NOT enough (see graph below).  Cutting the mid by setting the pot at 1/2 puts the mid and tweeter pretty close to being in balance, but then both of these drivers are way behind the woofer.  This is exactly what I do, but ... but then I bi-amp and raise the volume on the mids/tweeters to bring them back into balance with the woofer.

I further do this using just the three terminals that came from the factory. I've been doing this for close to 8 years now and I love having total control over speaker voicing.  I mean, AR intended their customers to have some control to correct for room, source, personal preference, etc.  That control which AR provided is limited as you can see by the graph.  With bi-amping you can make these speakers pretty much as "bright" as you want, yet you still have that wonderful deep AR bass.

Regards,

Jerry

AR-3a-graph.jpg

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12 hours ago, onplane said:

With bi-amping you can make these speakers pretty much as "bright" as you want, yet you still have that wonder deep AR bass.

Jerry, that sounds like a good technique that is easy to implement.

I have a not so easy active-eq project in mind for my own edification that is currently hung up with cost-benefit analysis and time-space continuum problems.

Roger

 

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2 hours ago, owlsplace said:

Jerry, that sounds like a good technique that is easy to implement.

I have a not so easy active-eq project in mind for my own edification that is currently hung up with cost-benefit analysis and time-space continuum problems.

Roger

 

Roger, you are sooo right! Implementing "passive bi-amping" is very easy. On the other hand, implementing "active" bi-amping on a three way speaker system is a significant challenge. I don't know whether anyone has even attempted it on a set of 3a's.

All I needed was a mid-power common ground amp to power the mids/tweeters as I was already using a high power amp to drive the 3a's. Fortunately, I had 3 or 4 of these collecting dust, so I just recycled one and put it back in service. That high power amp now just drives the woofers and I further use it as the master for source selection.

Regards,

Jerry

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