The Grungy Speaker Thread-By Request

[Ian Mackenzie]

Okay,


This is it, anything goes about anything and anyone........Mud Sticks.

If Giskard does post here first about the you know what I'll bare my .........you know what. No doubt we will see Bo follow shortly there after...he will.

Ian

[Figge]

i remember a long time ago in my youth 13-14 years ago me and a buddie bought a sort of diy kit (with 2*15" lf, 4* 6,5" mids and 4 dometweeters) from a mailorder company called Hobbex. we also got 2 walkietalkies if we bought for over a sertain amount, and we qualified. anyway got the stuff home and started with the cabinets. took alot of mdf and 2weeks of hard work after school. finally we hooked em up to his old pioneer 2*25W amp. and we both had the laugh of our lifes. i have never since that day heard anything worse!. but it was a fun experience. and thats what counts? we talk about them from time to time and they still provide us with a good laugh! so the money wasnt wasted.

[Regis]

My experience was last summer at a patio party here in the High Desert and someone had a large pair of Roger Sound Lab speakers that had seen better days. Except for myself, everyone else was fueled by alcoholic concoctions of various sorts and didn't seem to notice or mind what the over-driving Onkyo amp was doing the speakers. The sound of the usual 70's medley of Bob Seeger and The Allman Brothers band was reduced to shreds. Sonically it was equivalent to what would happen if hordes of tumbleweeds were forced to make love to pollinate, while on top of a corrugated barn. They just didn't know.

[Robh3606]

My favorates were Panasonic Thrusters!! Some cone tweeter a dual 5" midrange and an 8" passive radiator all in a box 12X24X4 deep. Now those were speakers


Rob

[John Nebel]

Guess AR-2 @ $89ea with no treble included is no match for these others

John

[scott fitlin]

My friend, back in my high school days, went to Lafayette and bought four of these speakers, they each had a 12in woofer, a small cone mid, and a piezo type tweeter! The cabinets were made of this thin pressboard that almost looked like cardboard! he had a Radio Shack REALISTIC reciever, and hadd all four speakers hooked up to it, and he swore he had my fathers L-300,s beat, the bass in his room was intense!

So I finally go over to hear it, man it was pure distortion, the speakers driven into total fuzzed out sound, mids blaring, and highs sounding like eggs frying! he was demoing his system with some Zeppelin, and Randy is swearing to me this beats your dads stupid JBL,s and that McIntosh amp. He said it even compared to the system we had in the Eldorado.

I just didnt have the heart to tell him he bought pure shit, but I did say, Hey Randy, theres this program on TV I want to catch....................

[Figge]

Originally posted by scott fitlin
piezo type tweeter!...pressboard that almost looked like cardboard!

eeww! really bad combination!

[GordonW]

One of the WORST speaker experiences I've had, was the "vaunted" AvantGarde Duo horn-speaker system. IMHO, the sound was EXTREMELY HARSH... like a fingernail driving a blackboard directly into my ear canal at high speed, with a disc brake raping a smoke alarm in the background. Dunno if it was ther amp, the room, or the speaker... but really, ANY speaker that could be "coaxed" into sounding THAT BAD, in ANY (even mis-done) setup, is something I'm not going to willingly have ANYTHING to do with. Especially when it costs thousands of dollars a pair!!

Did I mention that I REALLY DID NOT LIKE the Avantgarde Duo?

But, really... if you wanted TRULY AWFUL speaker experiences, one of the MOST TRUSTED methods was to be a car stereo installer in the early 1980s. At one of the earliest stereo contests, a guy showed up in a big old Chevy van, with 4 6x9 speakers, no box, just raw speakers, LAYING ON THE DASHBOARD. Somehow managed to hit 113dB A-weighted!! Talk about near immediate hearing damage! And that was only one of many ways that things got f***ed up... another, was the guy who had 8 Cerwin-Vega 12" woofers and some big Altec horns, firing forward in his Ford Escort EXP (the hatchback coupe). Wrong crossover points (the horns were literally CRACKLING at high volume), bad placement (the horn mouth was literally 6 INCHES BEHIND YOUR HEAD in the car, bad box design (one-note boom at 50 Hz, not much else!), bad wiring (the headlights would almost dim COMPLETELY OFF on big bass transients, he was overloading the electrical system SO badly). I'd estimate at least 33.3% distortion... and that's BEFORE he pegged the volume knob!!


Regards,
Gordon.
whew, I actually feel better now!

[Ian Mackenzie]

I will cop a pitch fork with this but who cares..

The worst so called monitor speaker of all time for me is the Altec 604 8G and all derivatives.

Not even a $10,000 audible illusions pre amp and value power amp could tame the harsh scratchy sound of this driver, certainly no match for the Tannoy 15 monitor gold of the same era.


Ian

[speakerdave]

Originally posted by Ian Mackenzie

The worst so called monitor speaker of all time for me is the Altec 604 8G and all derivatives . . . . certainly no match for the Tannoy 15 monitor gold of the same era.
Ian

Difference of opinion is what makes a market, I guess. I did listen to an older Tannoy for awhile. It was one of the few mono speakers I heard that was life-like.

Since I've been hearing music through the LSR32's I've been spoiled for a lot of things. I got along with the 604 8G for a long time, but I hooked mine up again here a week ago, and I'm having a little trouble with it, even with decent tube electronics. You can psycho-acoustic yourself into a lot of things. None of this stuff is perfect. If you're ever going to listen to music instead of gear you focus on a given system's good points and ignore the bad (if you can). That was actually my determination twenty-five years ago when I put this hobby aside--to listen to the music and try to not let the equipment irritate me. It's a good way to get along. But when I had a chance I dumped my "accurate" but dead dog AR11's and hooked up those 604's. It was like a breath of fresh air.

Stopped by a friend's house one Saturday afternoon a long time ago and got my first exposure to someone raving about a full range driver. Phase coherence definitely makes up for a healthy dose of other ills. But these were some small unknown full range drivers in 1.5 ft boxes. The coherence was palpable, but to me it was so obvious that it sounded like Vassar Clements was playing that fiddle under a blanket.

Hey, Macka, both you and Bo have the great 4348, but you've both allowed as how there's a tweak you need to get rid of horn rash, and that's just the way it is.

And be careful about exposure to LSR32's.

David

[Ian Mackenzie]

Quote.

http://audioheritage.csdco.com/vbull...5&pagenumber=2

quote:L100 Giskard

I too used them for many years, mostly as "saw horses" while building custom loudspeaker systems for home installations. They worked perfectly fine in that role.

I've also used them in a pinch to keep a big block "rat" from rolling around in a pickup truck bed. The cast iron was able to "dig" into the oiled black walnut and form makeshift motor mounts for the ride to the machine shop.

Perhaps the best use I found for them though was using them to prop open sash windows, drivers facing out into the gently falling snow, and playing Halloween music at volume when Christmas Carolers came down the street.

***********************************************
I would have anticipated a direct post but such is the poetry of the ideocentic Teck Bot Knocker.

How could it be repeated, it was an original work of a "Master JBL Baster" ......can't wait for the 4xxx thrashing.

The graffiti in the thunder box must demand admission.


Ian

[Maron Horonzakz]

Ian ......Giskard didnt post first..........We,r waiting......Drop em & bare em

[4313B]

Sorry Ian, I thought this was "The Grungy Speaker Thread-By Request" thread and I don't consider L100's to be grungy.

[Ian Mackenzie]

So we will just improvise hey.


Ian

[Ian Mackenzie]

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