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Transmaster

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About Transmaster

  • Birthday 05/13/1952

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    Cheyenne, Wyomimg
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    Life long musician, Irish Terriers, Ham Radio Operator, vintage vacuum tube equipment.

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  1. My supply of cloth surround dope has dried out. I purchased what I had from a person on eBay who formulated it specifically for AR speakers. Great stuff. I have a cloth surround 10” woofer from a W45 Wharfedale. The eBay source is not available right now. What are you using? I was looking at the Electric Guitar Amp forums, a lot of their speakers have cloth surrounds. There is no way I am going to use the voodoo goo they are suggesting.
  2. This brings back memories. https://www.leagle.com/decision/19811757508fsupp124911545
  3. That is a problem you will have with the Sansui speaker in their day they were not considered to be top line speakers. We considered them too boomy. So repair pairs are going to be a problem. You need to decide if they are worth repairing. I just checked there are a pile of Sansui's available on eBay.
  4. You need to replace the surrounds. Simply Speakers is were you need to check. This were I go for such stuff. https://www.simplyspeakers.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwsYb0BRCOARIsAHbLPhH_0bNW6C_iUojduh_B2iGje9J0nSe7vHVRVZtGOBQNC-TdngPdHMYaAs0HEALw_wcB
  5. What I have found in my circa 1970 Wharfdale Achromatic "E" series Speakers is to preserve and improve their "English" sound that a good NPE does the trick. The originals were a Hong Kong made Minerva NPE's They had atrocious ESR's. Replaced them with Mundorf E-Cap's. They settled in, in about an hour very pleased with the result. The W-45's, my favorites are wonderful. Watching one if the PS Audio vodcasts the presenter was talking about by-pass capacitors. I don't buy into voodoo audio but I decided way not. The rule seems to be a capacity with in the tolerance of the main cap's So I added 0.1 mFd 400 VDC Sonicraft Gen ll's To each NPE., The jury is still out on this addition. Cost less than $20 bucks so I am not out much. Sound wise the W45's blow my brothers AR-2AX's out of the room, with half the power. .
  6. Yes you can here the difference with modern speakers. But first you have to listen to examples of such instruments. The difference is very subtle and impossiable to describe. A good example would be James Galway. Galway really pioneered the use of the Golden Flute. He plays both silver and gold flutes so you can listen to him playing both instruments. . Generally the Gold flute has a more rounded sound then a silver flute. Sliver flute have a subtly sharper sound. The small number of Platnium flutes in the world have an even more rounded sound then the Golden one. Another area to compare is Saxophones. with a traditional Lacquer finish, or without. An unfinished Saxophone has a brighter sound then a finished one.
  7. There is one thing I want to know. If I ask this question over on Audio Karma a flame war will ensue, the level of snarkyness there is almost as bad as an Apple forum. Is there a break in period for Audio film capacitors. As you know I installed Sonicap Gen 1's for the tweeter side of the XO's and Axon True Caps for the "woofer" side. of my Monitor 10B;s after about 350 hours of use I do notice a big difference in the sound. This was a very subtle thing It took awhile to notice it. I suppose it took this long for the improvement to be enough for me to hear it. On the Polk forum I was told the Sonicap break in was somewhere around 400 hours. The Axon's seem to be coming on right now. This is a not subjective thing I have been listening to the same music on these speakers for over 20 years. At first they where powered by a Sansui integrated stereo amp, then a really nice JVC integrated amp, a crappy Sony AV receiver which blasted the right channel 10B when the right hand set of PA's failed, and now with the Onkyo TX-NR709. When I first fired up the refurbished 10B's on the Onkyo they sounded great, the bass was a bit snappish,and I didn't notice any improvement in the upper reaches, but the 10B's worked. Listening to those same bench mark albums after all the hours of play time on the refurbished XO's the 10B's sound fantastically better then they ever have. By the way should this ever come up in you speaker repair business the new replacement Polk MW-6503 driver sounds the same as the original pair I have in the other 10B. The only difference you can see is the wires for the voice coil no longer are attached to the speaker cone but go directly to the spade connectors. I sure wish I could get replacement midrange and tweeters for the Warfedale W-35's compared to the 10B's they don't fair well.
  8. When I read somebody reciting the litany of the Crossover capacitor I can almost hear the Organ, or the Bells announcing the reading of the Gospel; The Gospel of Dueland Cast........Thanks be to Dueland. But what these communicants remind me of the most are wine snobs at a wine tasting, and their closed eyed descriptions of the wine they are tasting. Crossover capacitors do make a difference. In the case of the Polk Monitor 10B's the Sonicaps, and Axon's have made a gigantic difference, but I was replacing 20+ year old non-polarized electrolytics and in one speaker a pair of fried mid-woofers, and a crossover with one cap that had detonated. I also replaced the 20+ year old Monster Cable speaker wire,with 12AWG cable with proper banana plug terminators.from Monoprice. I had good advice form you and others and I am very pleased with the results. As an exercise in the ridiculous I decided to see what it would have cost if I had more money then brains. Recapping with the above mentioned Dueland Cast capacitors would have cost me $7,381.02.
  9. Thanks I guessed what it was, I got close This audio stuff is sure different then the RF world I come from. And I thought since I was adapt at digging around in the innards of really old radio's and knew all about the parts and theory of operation, electro-mechanical speakers and such, I understood this audio stuff......har-dee-harr-harr By the way do you know about this outfit; http://www.humblehomemadehifi.com/index.html check out the section that reviews capacitors. according to it the Axon True Cap is better then Solen, and number of others and they are really cheap, and for a customer look really cool. I have a pair of them on the low side of the XO's on the Monitor 10B's after 300 or so hours the bass response is better then it ever has been.
  10. Is this the link? if so thank you interesting read. http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/sciences/physics/electromagnetism/electrostatics/Capacitors/Applications/BasicConsiderations/BasicConsiderations.htm
  11. There may be something in this. I do have a head full of musical recordings. I think is it more a deal of, yes it sounds like crap but I don't care I know what it is supposed to sound like. However when we do concentrate on the sound its self we can discriminate quiet well. One of the better ways of evaluating a system is to listen to individual instruments. An example would be the subtle differences in the sounds of a silver, gold, and platinum flute. It cannot be described but pointed out. Or the more obvious difference between a small and larger bore (Tenor) trombone I once had a beautiful Bach small bore (.450") Trombone which I had fun playing the music of Glenn Miller. This is one of those areas that where we who play this music nit-pick; playing a large bore trombone, grrr, even worse a trigger trombone.....get a rope. So if we stop being lazy we can hear the difference. As for the ultimate single instrument for testing a sound system there is nothing better then a large Wurlitzer theater (Pipe) Organ, stupendous sound, even more difficult then a church organ to reproduce because of all of the bells and whistles ( a term coined for the Wurlitzer). My mother can remember as a child in the late 1930's watching and hearing the performances of Wurlitzers. She described one an Art-Deco styled 4 rank console raising up onto the stage on hydraulics while the organist was making the earth move.
  12. Thank you Carlspeak I dropped this link to Ken Kantor's Audio Fetishes article in on a long standing flame war over at the Polk Audio Forum concerning cables and such. The true believers dismissed me because I am a musician, and have been for 50 or so years, something about not being objective!? because I am a musician, ah what! I challenged them to nay-say this Papal Bull from the Speaker God Ken Kantor. I expect to hear screaming any time now :P
  13. I had some friends back in the 1970's who must have had more money then brains. They had to have the latest and greatest in audio technology which was great for me as I could listen to really rare high end speakers. I remember the original Ohm speakers with the Walsh drivers. They were very inefficient, required power levels, which at the time, where not cheap to obtain but the power levels they could handle where fairly narrow, it didn't take much to blow one up. I can't imagine how one of the originals could handle a band like NIghtwish blasting away. I was looking at the Ohm website I see a lot of their business is supplying parts, and a repair shop for older models.
  14. There was just one recording from England that incorporated the 20 cycle note, at least that was the story at the time. I don't remember the label now. But the bottom end it had was impressive. As you can imagine there was so much bovine scatology floating around at the time and the instrumentation to test out all of this BS just was not available outside of a audio lab. Now I would just put one of my "O" scopes on the output and see just what was going on. Wish I had that old record it would be interesting to check it out. To me the biggest boondoggle was the quadraphonic record. I still have a few of them, all thought the equipment to play them back is long gone. If you remember there where two systems the Quadradisc, otherwise known as Compatible Discrete 4, and SQ (Stereo Quadraphonics) In fact the Warfedale W35's with a pair of W25's where part of the quad system I had at the time. The studio engineers played all kinds of games with what little channel separation there was. The two best recording, which I still have are Santana's Black Magic women, and a full score recording of the 1812 overture, this included the opening choir, and a military brass band prelude. They where apparently never reissued on CD.
  15. That makes sense, a re-cap so simple. I have two set of speakers I need to re-cap, the W-35's. and the Polk 10B's. Did a look see on the W-35's crossover, a Very interesting visual. The crossover is hand built does not use a printed circuit board but point to point wiring. There is; 1 4 micro Farad 50 volt cap' 1 8 micro Farad 50 volt cap' 1 12 micro Farad 50 Volt cap' 3 wire wound inductors, Henry value not listed on the parts and I didn't use my instruments to find out, and 2 potentiometers for adjusting the output level of the tweeter, and mid-range. What is interesting is these W35's sound so good with music that was popular when they where in production. classical, Big Band, period rock-n-Roll, early new age. western, . However with modern electronica, trance, dark Ambient, Orchestral Metal, not so good. With the W35 a sub-woofer is a must to remove the lower frequency sounds an eight inch woofer of the early 1970's just cannot reproduce. Fortunately the Onkyo TX-NR709 I just purchased has built in controls for a subwoofer so you can set the upper frequency cutoff for the sub-woofers, one of the settings is 150hz and down is sent to the subwoofer 150hz is just about right for the lower end on the W35's woofers. My old bench mark for lower frequencies in music was The Dawn Fanfare in Also sprach Zarathustra (ASZ) (Richard Strauss 1896) it has a 20 cycle organ pedal note in it at the beginning. It was very, very hard for tube type, and early solid state audio amps to reproduce, and most speakers that where smaller then the legendary Klipschorn speakers where hopeless. I remember going into a audiophile store with a London recording (LP) of ASZ that actually had the 20hz note I wanted to hear these house sized Klipschorn speakers in action. The salesman put the record on and cranked the volume up and we sat back and listened, the pedal note came on and those glorious speakers actually vibrated all of the display placards off of all of the other speakers in the listening room, it looked like an earth quake had hit the place, which is basically what had happened. The Salesman was stunned, He could not believe a speaker could do this. He purchased that record off of me to demonstrate these speakers with. He told me later on he sold a bunch of Klipschorn speakers using this recording. Now modern solid state amp's have absolutely no trouble, and with a modern subwoofers even lower frequencies are routine.
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