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Whaa you need two?
Like having double of certain things like stereos and toyotas, Well the price was wasn't bad and my original one is full of dust and has static, this looks a lot cleaner, but I am cranking the old one right now, it also came with the original box. I'll take apart the old one, clean it out and possibly service.
 
I love these old pics(y)....a much different time...for sure...I can remember going to the local market and getting those wooden crates that held produce in them and staining them to make speaker stands and hold LPs in....and of course the LP's were used to separate the "stems from the seeds" by tilting them and letting gravity take care of the seeds
I remember people using plastic milk crates to hold records. Then Canada switched to metric, the liter and 2 liter milk cartons were smaller than the old quarts and half gallons, records would no longer fit inside of milk crates! Likely American milk crates would not work either, the Yankee gallon is smaller than the Imperial one!
 
The blue lights...the blue lights...WOW..if I only had a flux capacitor...Great Scott I love those Marantz "time machines"...if only I could go back in time to that period of my life...I'm just glad you didn't show us a picture of those babies in a dark room...I would have passed out :bowing:
Not fair..... You guys keep complaining about our blue eyed monster!!
 
Totally awesome! I lived very close to the big Allied Radio store on Western Ave in Chicago for many years and I built a number of Knight Kits back in the day. I also built a illegal linear amp for my CB using a pair of 6146B output tubes, think it did about 80 watts AM and quite a bit more in SSB.

I do miss my old tube HiFi in Chicago, maybe not super accurate but sweet sounding none the less. VTL 100 monoblocks into Klipsch La Scala's and NAD SS 300 watt monoblocks driving a pair of 7' tall early HSU subwoofers. (CA 1994) Look up "dynamic" in the dictionary and your see a picture of that rig. But here's a poor one of mine anyway. LOL You can also see a Dynaco ST70 sitting in reserve on the right shelf.
View attachment 58396

Some years before the VTL tubes (CA 1980) I had Crown IC150 preamp and Phase Linear 700B power. The neighbors were not friendly. LOL
View attachment 58397

Reaching back to my first real HiFi + multich was my Marantz 2270 receiver and 2440 quad adapter driving MicroAcustic speakers.
Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine
Lately, it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been

View attachment 58400
View attachment 58399
Are those folks in the witness protection program;)
 
I have 4 milk crates full of albums bought after I filled the other shelves.

I have also built more stuff that I bought.

Kits:
- Two Dynaco PAT-4 preamps
- One Dynaco PAS-3 tube preamp
- Two Dynaco 35 tube power amps
-Two Dynaco 120 amps (built for hire for others)
- One SWTPC reverb
- One Heathkit VTVM
- One Heathkit Wahwah pedal (hired to do)
- One Heathkit Volume/distortion pedal (hired to do)
- One Heathkit metronome (gave as a gift)
- Three Knight Kit CB walkie-talkies
- One Knight Kit experimenter's board.
- One SWTPC strobe light
- One Archer short wave radio

My own designs:
- DJ crossfade mixing board
- Stereo control center (12 sources, 3 tapes, and 3 room outputs)
- Stereo patch panel (6 sources, 2 tapes, and 2 room outputs)
- Phono equalizer preamp for old records with nonstandard EQ
- Several balanced-line matrix encoder attachments for 4-bus mixing boards.
- Several unbalanced-line matrix encoder attachments for 4-bus mixing boards.
- Several passive matrix decoders (My UQ-1, UQ-4, UQ-44, and UQ-1A units)
- Decaphonic matrix selector and controller
- An imaging speaker controller to use with UQ-44 (attempt at side imaging)
- A mixer expander adding 4 channels to an aux return
- Guitar timbre gate
- My Surrfield mic array
- 3 color organs
- Multiple thermostat furnace controller
- Full-spectrum LED light source
- Color blindness simulating light source
- Special light source lets people with anomalous color vision see normal colors.
- Several AC and DC power supplies for various purposes
- A digital experimentation breadboard
- Fiber optic video interface for safe TV camera in swimming pool
- RS-232 interface tester
- Analog-to-digital interface system
- pH meter probe tester and calibrator
- Strain gage tester
- Short wave preselector and antenna switcher
- Short wave marker generator
- Color vision tester
- Automatic doorbell
- Traffic-actuated hall and stair lights
- Electrostatic air filter charger
- Screw vernier thermostat fine control
- Infrared radiation replacer for cold room
- Several Christmas light pattern generators
- Christmas light string and controller matching tester
- Christmas light controller to string matching device
- Add frost-free to a dorm refrigerator
- Add anticipator control to old style window air conditioner
- Add second-gear-start for winter driving to a 2002 Pontiac Bonneville
- Modified a Technics dual cassette to add relay play.
- Modified a Collaro Conquest record changer to add magnetic cartridge, antiskate, ball bearings, cue control, pitch control, and automatic speed change.
- Modified a Perpetuum Ebner PE-2038 record changer to add a repeat function

There are many others that didn't come to mind when I typed this.
 
In my list of valve stuff above I mentioned a Magic Eye spectrum analyser. In case any of you haven't seen such a thing, here it is -
SA1.JPG

I built it from a German kit (very easy, just two printed boards with all the surface mount caps and resistors already mounted, all you had to do was fit the conventional components) -
SA2.JPG

Of no practical value whatsoever, but it is great fun in operation! -
SA3.JPG
 
Here are the homebuilt speakers that reside in my man cave.
When a friend of mine purchased of a pair of 12” high compliance woofers my journey toward the construction of these speakers actually began. I was amazed by the bass produced by these newer style woofers, but my speaker building career had started before that.
I was used to the old style paper coned woofers, those with a very stiff suspension. My original home built speakers used a Marsland 8” woofer with a whizzer cone. It had a 40 oz ceramic magnet and 40 -14,000Hz frequency response. They came from Gladstone Electronics in Toronto. Mounted in a bass reflex cabinet, the design of which was published in an electronics magazine (I forget which one) but the issue was from 1964. Those speakers sounded fantastic to me at the time. My father had the lumber yard cut the plywood to the sizes shown in the article, I just had to put it together almost like a kit!
Next reasoning that bigger was better I purchased similar type speakers but 12” they had a front plate holding two 4” paper coned tweeters, made by Radio Speakers of Canada, also from Gladstone. As I recall they were also recommended to be used in a bass reflex cabinet. The actual construction details were sparser but they recommended a box shape in accordance with the “Golden Rectangle”. I built a couple of slightly different designed boxes they sounded good but didn’t really blow me away. I remember adding a dome tweeter to the cabinet coupled through a 2 μFD capacitor and noticing the much improved high end. The paper coned tweeters attached to the woofers were not very good.
Back to the high compliance woofers, I had decided that I wanted to build a three way speaker system; the new woofers were good for bass but not very good for mid frequencies. With information from speaker building books and my own intuition, I came up with a cabinet design that was wide enough to accommodate the woofer but not much more. To get the cabinet volume up I made it deeper. At that time I was noticing that narrower speakers seemed to sound better than wider ones, better dispersion I guess. I no longer followed the speaker builder books recommendation of dimensions in the shape of the golden rectangle. Intuitively just by looking at it in the catalogue, I thought that the Philips domed midrange would be ideal for reproducing the midrange, and I was right. I ended up building four speakers using the unbranded woofer, Philips midrange (or squawker) and Peerless domed tweeter, as well as an unbranded three way crossover, most components came from Addison Electronics in Montreal. Latter on I decided to add a passive radiator to the design. I cut the opening in the bottom (floor) of the cabinet and mounted the passive radiator there. I then added Shepherd Casters to the bottom of the speaker to raise it off the floor. The bass response was amazing, hardly accurate but a perfect complement for the mainly rock music that I was listening to at the time. I covered the speakers with cork wall tiles and ordered custom made foam grills for them as well. Those speakers served well for several years, but then I got the speaker building bug again.
When I started reading about the benefits of bi-amplification. It made perfect sense to me. If you look at a typical audio music waveform on an oscilloscope screen you will notice high frequencies riding on top of the bass waveform but at a much lower level than the bass. If the level is raised to the point of clipping much of that higher frequency waveform gets chopped off, that process causes even more high frequency energy but its all distortion. Clipping sounds terrible on any system, it’s funny how some people don’t think that music isn't loud unless it is clipping! In a bi-amped system even If the bass was to clip much of the distortion products will fall outside the frequency range of the speaker and thus not be as audibled. With the bass removed from a signal the remainder can easily be driven to very high levels without any distortion due to clipping.
For awhile I was toying with the idea of using oak whisky barrels as cabinets for my woofers. That would have made a separate enclosure for the mid/high frequencies necessary. I had been reading about the benefits of running multiple drivers in a speaker system. The main one being lower distortion, each speaker has to move a shorter distance for the same sound output level. I decided I wanted to use four midrange and four tweeters per speaker, that way they could be connected in series parallel to keep the impedance at eight ohms. All drivers and the crossover network were Philips branded. I chose the new fabric domed Philips midrange (the old ones had paper cones), and similar matching tweeters. I then started to experiment. First I tried mounting the speakers in a cubed shaped enclosure; I was hoping that the wide dispersion of the drivers would be enough to create an omnidirectional speaker. The results were terrible; the speakers beamed in four directions and were almost silent off axis. Next I tried a cabinet design roughly in the shape of a Bose 901 speaker. Three mid/tweeter combination were mounted on the front the last one on the back. I hung the speaker from the floor joists in the basement, below it sat a woofer in a separate cabinet. Well the disjointed sound of that experiment showed me that the woofer needs to be very close to the other drivers or it just doesn’t sound right at all.
I had decided that I wanted to use two 12” woofers for the bass. My speaker book from Philips showed recommended enclosure volumes for their various woofers, but nothing about running two woofers in one enclosure. So again by intuition I assumed it should be about twice the volume as for a single speaker. I constructed another cabinet to hold the two woofers, and mounted two squawkers and two tweeters above them; it would have been approximately twice as high as my other set of speakers. The other two squawkers and tweeters were mounted on top of the enclosure. I wasn’t an attempting to create a direct/reflecting type speaker (In fact I had started reading negative reviews of that approach causing a blurring of the stereo image). I just did it as a way to ensure that when you got up and walked around the room you could still hear each speaker directly and also to mount them all on the front panel would have necessitated a monstrous sized enclosure. It worked out as intended. In fact they sound so good that they have remained my main speakers for forty plus years!
I used pre finished shelving to cover the speaker sides and back and ordered custom made foam grills for the front and top. Shepherd Casters were again added to the bottom of the speakers to allow easy movement and positioning of the speakers.
Later on I added a couple of toggle switches to the bottom of the speakers, one to connect the woofers in series (16 ohm) or parallel (4 ohm). Another switch was added to connect the speakers for normal (non bi-amped) operation. In the (normal) position only one woofer is driven (to keep 8 ohm impedance) via the 3-way crossover. The second woofer then acts like a passive radiator. In the Bi-amped position the woofers are connected separately bypassing the crossover. Some crossover components are also bypassed so that the midrange does not receive double crossover filtering during bi-amp operation.

Speaker.JPG
Speaker front.JPG
Speaker Top.JPG
Speaker Back.JPG
 
Great Post Ken! I meant to reply some time ago but once that intent fell victim to reading your post on my phone & when I got home, well you know how it goes.

I was used to the old style paper coned woofers, those with a very stiff suspension. My original home built speakers used a Marsland 8” woofer with a whizzer cone. It had a 40 oz ceramic magnet and 40 -14,000Hz frequency response. They came from Gladstone Electronics in Toronto.

Haha my 1st speaker "project" in my early teens involved utilizing a my bed's nightstand cabinet. I pnly had to mount a front baffle, cut a hole, and mount the speaker. The speaker was a 12" paper cone high compliance with a whizzer cone also & purchased from Olson Electronics. I was the only in my family with a color TV (JC Penney 21" round tube) so I immediately hooked it up to that. One rotary switch later & I could select the TV, Lucor R2R, and my AM/FM clock radio. Long before the introduction of stereo to my house hold.

I hung the speaker from the floor joists in the basement, below it sat a woofer in a separate cabinet. Well the disjointed sound of that experiment showed me that the woofer needs to be very close to the other drivers or it just doesn’t sound right at all.

That is something that never would have occurred to me! Of course ceiling mounted speakers are all the rage nowadays thanks to ATMOS. You were ahead of your time. FWIW I have experimented with good quality 6.5" car speakers mounted in my ceiling. Much to my surprise if one is mounted forward of you & one behind, in line, pans from front to back have almost no effect. Mount the overhead to the sides & over head pans left to right give an amazing & almost scary sensation of height.

If the level is raised to the point of clipping much of that higher frequency waveform gets chopped off, that process causes even more high frequency energy but its all distortion. Clipping sounds terrible on any system, it’s funny how some people don’t think that music isn't loud unless it is clipping!

True, that! In the late 60's I had a nice stereo R2R with built in amps & detachable speakers. I think the amp was rated 9 watts a ch & that was pre FTC. When I was showing it off to a friend he was amazed at how loud 9 watts sounded. Of course eventually very loud music will hurt your ears & that's why people equate clipping & distortion with loud. That's all my recorder was doing probably delivering 9 watts power at 9% distortion.

My 1st serious speaker mod came when I purchased a set of JBL Decade 36 speakers. 10" 3 way, all paper cones. The tonal balance was actually quite good but as I became more aware I realized it lacking in mid range detail & limited top end when I compared to other speakers. So I built a free standing module on top with a Peerless 3" dome mid-range & JVC ribbon tweeter for the top. I built my own xover for it. So the JBL was now nothing than a woofer enclosure.

Eventually I built from scratch rear ch speakers using Peerless 12" high compliance woofs with matching squawks & tweets. The JBL was tuned port, the rear ones were sealed enclosure. I went through several generational experiments on the xover, plugging the JBL port, experimenting with various amounts of damping in both set ups. I found that when I fixed one problem another popped up. Frustratingly I realized that me, not even building from a kit, could not excel over professional companies utilizing exacting design & test procedures. So that's what lead me to eventually buying my big Infinity speakers. But I do have fond memories of those DIY speaker projects & many hours of music appreciation.

JBL 2.jpg


Side note: one night I prepared for a long eveving of listening pleasure with brandy to be sipped. It took me a while to notice but something didn't sound quite right. No amount of changing sources or button pushing fixed the problem. But it definitely wasn't my imagination. Then I saw an odd little pile of black debris laying below the rear speakers on our lovely brown shag carpet. Closer inspection showed the 12" rubber surround had been been destroyed completely. A bit later our Schnauzer walked in & on her mustache I saw black flakey stuff. It became immediately apparent: my woofer had actually chewed up & destroyed my woofers!
 
Great Post Ken! I meant to reply some time ago but once that intent fell victim to reading your post on my phone & when I got home, well you know how it goes.



Haha my 1st speaker "project" in my early teens involved utilizing a my bed's nightstand cabinet. I pnly had to mount a front baffle, cut a hole, and mount the speaker. The speaker was a 12" paper cone high compliance with a whizzer cone also & purchased from Olson Electronics. I was the only in my family with a color TV (JC Penney 21" round tube) so I immediately hooked it up to that. One rotary switch later & I could select the TV, Lucor R2R, and my AM/FM clock radio. Long before the introduction of stereo to my house hold.



That is something that never would have occurred to me! Of course ceiling mounted speakers are all the rage nowadays thanks to ATMOS. You were ahead of your time. FWIW I have experimented with good quality 6.5" car speakers mounted in my ceiling. Much to my surprise if one is mounted forward of you & one behind, in line, pans from front to back have almost no effect. Mount the overhead to the sides & over head pans left to right give an amazing & almost scary sensation of height.



True, that! In the late 60's I had a nice stereo R2R with built in amps & detachable speakers. I think the amp was rated 9 watts a ch & that was pre FTC. When I was showing it off to a friend he was amazed at how loud 9 watts sounded. Of course eventually very loud music will hurt your ears & that's why people equate clipping & distortion with loud. That's all my recorder was doing probably delivering 9 watts power at 9% distortion.

My 1st serious speaker mod came when I purchased a set of JBL Decade 36 speakers. 10" 3 way, all paper cones. The tonal balance was actually quite good but as I became more aware I realized it lacking in mid range detail & limited top end when I compared to other speakers. So I built a free standing module on top with a Peerless 3" dome mid-range & JVC ribbon tweeter for the top. I built my own xover for it. So the JBL was now nothing than a woofer enclosure.

Eventually I built from scratch rear ch speakers using Peerless 12" high compliance woofs with matching squawks & tweets. The JBL was tuned port, the rear ones were sealed enclosure. I went through several generational experiments on the xover, plugging the JBL port, experimenting with various amounts of damping in both set ups. I found that when I fixed one problem another popped up. Frustratingly I realized that me, not even building from a kit, could not excel over professional companies utilizing exacting design & test procedures. So that's what lead me to eventually buying my big Infinity speakers. But I do have fond memories of those DIY speaker projects & many hours of music appreciation.

View attachment 59467

Side note: one night I prepared for a long eveving of listening pleasure with brandy to be sipped. It took me a while to notice but something didn't sound quite right. No amount of changing sources or button pushing fixed the problem. But it definitely wasn't my imagination. Then I saw an odd little pile of black debris laying below the rear speakers on our lovely brown shag carpet. Closer inspection showed the 12" rubber surround had been been destroyed completely. A bit later our Schnauzer walked in & on her mustache I saw black flakey stuff. It became immediately apparent: my woofer had actually chewed up & destroyed my woofers!
Ohhh no, it's contagious!:SB:smokin
 
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