[wotts]

   
Pair of these on the way. It has taken an amazing amount of willpower to not spill the beans on these until the deal was final.

 
 
My 1051s are jealous! They look very nice.

 

[PhoenixG]

   
 
My 1051s are jealous! They look very nice.

Hehe, I hinted at it when I said I had one more Mctrick coming.

 

[PhoenixG]

GAH! Ok, so I have two identical pairs of the same speaker. One pair sounded amazing, and the other sounded like hot poop in comparison. Ok, well honestly they sounded fine. Passable, but not really great or what I was expecting. Anyways, I pulled all of them apart to try to figure out why there was a difference. Long story short, somebody had installed both midranges 180 out of phase and incorrectly.
 
Long story long, I checked everything. I even dug into the crossover and cleaned every connection with deoxit. What I found was that on these midranges, each connector has two prongs; one prong is painted over to indicate the polarity of the connection, but could still be hooked on to if you weren't paying attention. On both midranges, the polarities were reversed and the painted prong had the connector on it. Once the mid was correctly installed, the speakers just opened up and sounded EXACTLY like their brothers. 
I'm just baffled. Why on earth would anyone ever put a connector on over paint? It obviously was wrong. 
And because y'all love photos...

 

[wotts]

I love it!
 
I had a similar thing going the day I brought home the XR 1051s. They were in the room with the HPM-100s and S-1010s, all hooked to the 1980. I wish I had snapped a photo.

 

[moodyrn]

I've been working on two vintage electrostatic projects lately and here are two post about them  from the vintage receiver/integrated thread. I thought it was time to post to the appropriate thread. For now I will mostly update my progress with the quads since the acoustats are mostly finished and required much less work.
 
IQuote:

Just want to make quick post of some vintage electrostatic speakers I've been playing with the past few weeks. They are acoustat spectra 11 esl hybrids, featuring a four foot tall esl panel on top of a bass unit with an 8 inch driver. Everything I've read about them points to the esl panel being gold and the bass unit being horrible. I will say I think both are under statements.

The sound coming from the esl panel is as good as "any" electrostatic I've listened to. But the bass is just atrocious. I mean probably the worse bass I've listen too which is why probably 99% of all owners replace the driver with something else. This gave me an opportunity to play around(a lot) with winisd, and over the last couple of weeks I've gone through 5 sets of drivers. But I will say with all of the ones I've tried, modeling with winisd has been spot on with the response I've gotten from each one of them.

One of the large obstacles is the enclosure for the 8in drive was way too large at 1.639cu. In this day and time that air space is too large for many 12 in drivers. But I did end up going with a 12in that is very renown for accuracy and sound quality. I've also rebuilt the bias and power supply with some caps on the way for the crossover along with making some small adjustment to the low pass crossover so that the 12s integrate perfectly with the esl panels.

These things are now sounding like one of the best speakers I've listened to at any price. I have them four feet off the rear wall and the sound is literally coming from the back wall 4ft behind the speakers and everywhere else in the room. They are just a beautiful sounding match with my macs..... Not bad for a 25 year old esl. Much more to follow in the vintage speaker thread.




Here's a before and after of the bias and power supply rebuild






and a pic of the back of the board with all of the flux removed. For some reason this is something the manufacturer neglected to do. And this board was caked full of it.





Oh and the speaker as a whole stands at just over six feet.

 
 

Thanks guys for the kind words and advice. I just got them in the house, so here are a few pics snapped with my phone. I hadn't put the legs on yet though.

 

 

[moodyrn]

As of now, I've pretty much gutted the quads and found that one of the mains transformers was fried, I have a ripped/torn dust cover from a bass panel of each of the speakers. The good news is there is no damage from arcing so I won't have to rebuild any of the panels. A replacement mains transformer was a bugger find. No quad repair shop in the US had one since it's something that rarely fails. No Shop in England or AUS had one either. I was fortunate enough to source one from Germany. I also have to parts coming to rebuild the power supply and crossovers which should arrive today. I rebuilt the dust covers earlier today and waiting for the glue to dry to finish those up. I hope to get started with the crossover rebuild today as well. I hope to have everything finished by this weekend and will update later today with pics of the teardown process.

 

[moodyrn]

Here's a pic of the torn dust cover, and pics with the torn plastic removed from both along with removal of the input transformers and power supplies.
.
 

 
The next pic really shows the importans of the dust covers as the electrostatic panels are a magnet for dust. 

It took while to get all of the dust off, the rear was even worst with layers upon layer of dust on everything.

 
And finally pics of the fried mains transformer. This thing was totally fried!
 

 

 
More more to come.

 

[JamesHuntington]

I'm a huge fan of vintage speakers. I currently own a pair of AR-2ax and rectilinear mini III. I love the sound of them with vinyl.
I offered to sell my friend a pair AR-2a that I got at a thrift store and had cleaned. I set them up in his room to his Cambridge amp. He was using new paradigms and a Polk audio sub at the time. He never switched back and is also now a believer.

 

[moodyrn]

Well, I'm finally fished with the quads. Here are a few pics of the rebuilt crossovers, power supply, and dust panels.





I do plan to build clamp boards sometime later. As a temporary solution, there's a mod to the crossover by placing a gas bulb between pin 7 and 9 that will clip them at 1.5kv volts where the treble panel will arc at around 2.2kv.

 

[PhoenixG]

I saw these and almost had a spit-take. Brand spankin' new hotness with all the gadgets- ipod, wifi, bluetooth, but the classic L100 styling! 

I'm starting to think we're really on to something with the vintage speakers. Kinda like the people who collect the old comic books eh?

 

[JamesHuntington]

  I saw these and almost had a spit-take. Brand spankin' new hotness with all the gadgets- ipod, wifi, bluetooth, but the classic L100 styling! 

I'm starting to think we're really on to something with the vintage speakers. Kinda like the people who collect the old comic books eh?

I used a program called sketch up a few years ago to make these. I have very little design or dimension experience but hope it inspires someone. I wanted to make the oldie style one piece stereo like the one in my grandparents house, but more up to date, elegant and hifi. 

 

[PhoenixG]

 
I used a program called sketch up a few years ago to make these. I have very little design or dimension experience but hope it inspires someone. I wanted to make the oldie style one piece stereo like the one in my grandparents house, but more up to date, elegant and hifi. 

NICE LOOK!
I think the only way I could justify a project like that with vintage parts is if a set of fantastic speakers came up for sale without a cabinet.
 
On an unrelated note - I had some time to listen to my xr-250's and found them to be a little soft in the midrange, so I did what anyone would do: I took them apart. I found pretty much what I was expecting for a 20+ year old set of speakers. At least one of the woofers was installed backwards (+/- reversed), plenty of the crimped connections were loose, the damping material had sagged and moved about, and a few items had come unglued from the x-overs and had the potential to jangle. I cleaned (deoxit) and recrimped all the crimp connections, re-installed the woofer that was backwards, re-glued loose x-over items, and rearranged the damping material. I've seen these problems plenty of times in the past. These problems are all very common on speakers that have been moved around a lot, serviced a few times, or are just plain old. 
 
End result: I found the response to have a few more dB's in the midrange, allowing the sound to be a bit more open and less 'distant'. Also, the bass was more controlled as well. I think it brought them into the flat response balance they were designed for with much more overall listening pleasure for me.

 

[PhoenixG]

So my cat managed to knock over one of my xr-16's the other day, impaling the midrange and busting the grill. Obviously I'm super bummed as they were some of my favorite speakers. I think I can fix them, so I made a trip to home depot to repair the grill with some pine 1/2x3/4'' and ordered mellotone grill cloth from adorama. Fixing the grill was easy enough. I even recovered the other one so they'd match. Now I don't have to constantly be reminded of how broken they are with the grills back on.
 
However, I'm not just looking for nice furniture, I want them to sound the same again. The real quandary I had was repair vs replace on the busted driver. I was able to find a replacement online, but it was a slightly older variant of the driver and the part numbers will never match again. I also got a mailer with one of the little fly out ads for reconing speakers from parts express. Serendipity? I hope so. I'm giving it a shot and I'll tell you all how it goes.

 

[joehalo]

Good luck with the fix. Anyone ever heard a pair of infinity kappa 7s? Does $300 for a mint pair sound fair?

 

[PhoenixG]

I think Inifnity has made a LOT of decent speakers. Their house sound is very pleasing to me. However, I've been more drawn to their newer items with the CMMD drivers more so than their older items.
That being said, I think your price is right. Be aware of condition, as always.
This guy had a great article about reconditioning a pair that sounded "off".
http://www.soundfountain.com/infinity/kappa7a_1.html