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CSW Ensemble by Henry Kloss


JKent

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I previously wrote about the Cambridge SoundWorks Ambiance speaker here: http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Board/index.php?showtopic=7315

This "Other Speakers" section is probably the more appropriate place.

This time we have the smaller "Ensemble" speaker. The Ensemble is essentially the same size as the highly touted Radio Shack Minimus 7 and in my opinion the Ensemble is superior. That may not be a fair comparison because the Ensemble is a 3-piece system. The satellites MUST be used with the sub or they sound pretty bad. But with the passive sub they are really terrific. Hookup instructions shown below.

The Ensemble originally came in an MDF cabinet. Later versions had a plastic cabinet. Both were covered in Nextel, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time but with age the Nextel turns sticky and scrapes off.

There were a couple of issues with this pair: The Nextel, as shown in the first photo, was deteriorated and gummy. The "woofers" (mids, actually) have foam surrounds so those had to be replaced. And since I was working on these anyway I decided to recap them. The real woofers, in the sub enclosure, have rubber surrounds.

First the cabinets were stripped down to the primer using lacquer thinner and scrapers. Denatured alcohol may also work. The cabinets were then sprayed with spray-on "truck bed liner" which creates a nice black pebble finish that is somewhat reminiscent of the original Nextel.

I replaced the foam surrounds. Working with small surrounds is a pain and the ones I used had an inner diameter that was a tad larger than I would have preferred so there was only about 1/16" to glue to the cone. They turned out fine though. I "hinged" the dust caps to shim, then glued the original DCs back in place. SpeakerWorks has some surrounds that are probably a better fit.

The crossover has 4 electrolytic caps: 2.2uF, two 6.8uF and a 150uF. I replaced the 3 smaller ones with film, the 150 with an NPE. All of the new caps were physically larger than the originals and one 6.8uF had to be installed hanging off the side of the PCB so the board could be slid back into place.

The Ensembles have nice toggle switches to adjust the levels of the mids and tweeters.

Questions welcome.

-Kent

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Passive sub-sat systems were all the rage in the late ‘80’s-early ‘90’s.

Bose came out with their AM-5 in 1987 and CSW followed with their Ensemble around 1988 or 89.

The original Ensemble was a four-piece system, with two passive sub enclosures. I don’t remember when CSW came out with a cheaper, simpler 3-piece version of the original.

I was at BA in the early ‘90’s. They countered the AM-5/CSW Ensemble with the Sub Sat 6 around 1990 or 91. The Sub Sat 6 used dual 6 ½” woofers in a sealed/ported bandpass enclosure. The sats used a 4” woofer and an inexpensive ¾” phenolic dome tweeter in a plastic housing with a perforated metal grille. The sat enclosure had decent reinforcement ribbing inside, but not great.

We had both the Bose and the CSW in house for comparison listening tests and measurements.

We expected the Bose to be easy to beat, and it was. It had a huge hole around 150-180 Hz, because the bass module was a 6th-order dual internally-ported bandpass ("Acoustimass") system, so it dropped like a stone—36 dB/octave—above 150 Hz. This was a great design because any THD products from 40 or 50 or 60 Hz (3rd-order THD—the really offensive kind-- is 120 or 150 or 180 Hz to those fundamentals) were way down in the mud because the bass module simply would not reproduce them into the listening area.

Very clever and very intentional on Bose’s part.

The cube sats’ 2 ½” drivers couldn’t get below 180Hz in their wildest fantasy, so there was a huge hole between 150-ish and 200-ish. But this was ok, because the system sounded clean, never heavy or bloated in the lower mid area, and the bass distortion was never audible. A nice peak around 10kHz totally fooled the casual listener into thinking the AM-5 had “highs,” even though the sats surrendered by 13kHz.

It sounded the way it sounded on purpose, not because Bose didn’t know what they were doing. It always amazes me when people think that Bose “can’t engineer” things. They have incredible engineers and the very best facilities and equipment. They are absolutely SOTA. Their stuff is intentional, not accidental. It’s designed to sell like crazy and make their customers happy with their purchase. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The real surprise to us at BA was the Ensemble (the 4-piece set, which also had the Nextel sats). It was astonishing—astonishingly bad. As in horrible-sounding and horrible-measuring. It was so bad, we went out and bought another sample, just to make sure there was nothing amiss with the first one.

There wasn’t. The original CSW 4-piece Ensemble was the most surprisingly awful speaker from a well-reputed manufacturer that I’ve ever encountered.

Our Sub Sat 6 absolutely, completely, totally stomped both of them in every objective measured result, and it sounded far, far superior to trained audiophile ears in every conceivable way.

That didn’t stop the AM-5 from outselling it by at least a factor of 5, nor did it stop CSW from being extremely successful with their products, bolstered by those numerous magazine ads of Henry mysteriously seated in the dark with his back to the camera, touting a “breakthrough” new speaker.

Steve F.

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  • 1 month later...

I also acquired a pair of later plastic-cabinet Ensemble IIs without a sub. Then it turned out that although the speakers looked alike, it was actually one Ensemble II and one "Movie Works". The plastic cabinets are nearly identical but the Movie Works has different, shielded woofer & tweeter and a different crossover. And the tweeter was damaged :(

Instead of tossing them I decided to experiment a bit. As with the earlier pair the Nextel was stripped off and the cabinets were sprayed with truck bed liner. The bass drivers are MCM 4" aluminum cone units, Part # 55-1856. CSP member Pete Basel had mentioned these as a possible Minimus 7 replacement.

The tweeters are "Apex Jr" closeout specials @ $1 each. There has been speculation that they are Onkyo automotive tweeters. Whatever, I had used them before and they are quite nice. I made a faceplate out of 1/8" masonite.

The crossover is basically the Pete Basel/Zilch design for the Minimus 7.

The end result sounds good to me. Here are pics of the finished speakers, the xo and a side-by-side with the Mini 7.

Kent

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