PART THREE: Forty Plus Years Buying and Trying Home Stereo Speakers. Dynaco Spendor B&W

November 3, 2018

#285

Gentle reader,

This picture is from the time that I added a SONY multi-channel receiver and a universal player so that I could experience the 6-channel SACDs that I have in my collection. So, I had two complete systems in the one room.

Oddly, I now have two complete systems in THIS room. The stack right next to me.

If you haven't seen the first two chapters, please read them first. It will help put things in perspective.

PART ONE: Forty Plus Years Buying and Trying Home Stereo Speakers. Dynaco Spendor B&W  

And:

PART TWO: Forty Plus Years Buying and Trying Home Stereo Speakers. Dynaco Spendor B&W

We left off with the first of the speakers that start with M. Since the MACH series were Radio Shack speakers, technically, they should have been under R. But, I'm not going to quibble.

And so should these Minimus 11 speakers from the same place.

Typical, cheap spring terminals offer the minimum of contact area for your music to squeeze through.

The only positives I see above are rubber surround and that the tweeter is horn loaded.

Parts Express to the rescue! The cabinets are cast aluminum and very rigid. I love these AMT tweeters!

While Parts Express may carry an exact replacement for the woofers in these cabinets, I wanted better quality and the deepest bass for the size of the woofer. So, my make-do mounting actually worked well. No air leaks. I later painted the washers black.

Talk about a large magnet structure! Adapting the Air Motion Transformer tweeters to the "horns" worked out well.

Much better crossovers and proper three-way binding/banana terminals completed the upgrade job. 

The back plates are thick sheet steel, so again, I had to compromise. But still, no air leaks. They sound great!

The next ones I wanted to tackle were the small but attractive wooden versions of the venerable Radio Shack Minimus. The 7W.

Hard to capture on sensor is Limited EDITION in gold on the new emblems. Limited alright, to ONE pair!
You are probably familiar with the popular Minimus 7 crossover upgrade kits offered by a seller on eBay. I decided that was the first step.

I was fortunate to find a seller offering two woven Kevlar woofers from the cult-followed Optimus LX4 speakers on eBay.

And of course the Parts Express AMT ribbon tweeters. 

Nice thing about the small wooden Radio Shack speakers cabinets is they often have round holes even for square or rectangular speaker terminals. Now they have proper terminals.

Above is the replacement kit. Below is the terminal mounted original crossover.

Here is an image when I was trying out four pairs of speakers at the same time. The AR speakers seen in PART ONE, Minimus 11, Optimus LX5 and Minimus 7W prior to buying and installing the AMT tweeters.

That is 1/4" Lexan they are sitting on. The right channel was arranged mirroring the left. That made each pair equidistant from the side walls. I sometimes shake my head looking at ALL of the things I did and tried in pursuit of the best sound.

WAF* would be higher with these white Minimus 7 speakers.

*Wife Approval Factor. To be politically correct, Spouse or Partner could be used. Something I've never been accused of being, PC, that is.

Now we come to a pair of handmade tower speakers built by someone in Maryland. No particle board or MDF was used. Just solid OAK, 3/4" thick and well constructed.

He chose, wait for it,.......Radio shack components. Well, the stores were THE place locally to find electronics. Check out this site to see the incredible amount of electronics they once carried: Radio Shack Catalogs
Every catalog has been scanned and one can look through each and every page. When you click on the page on the right, the page turns just like you were doing it. Corny but fun. 

He, assuming it was a man, was a good woodworker. The side panel above was made from three boards, joined together.

Above the tweeter attenuator is his Maryland driver's license number. The first thing I did to them was those terminals.

I chose components from Parts Express. The speaker cabinet program crunched the numbers and recommended that the cabinets be sealed for these woofers. So, to cover the hole, I put in the old tweeter at first.

I found that I preferred the sound from the Radio Shack tweeter better. So the new tweeters became the port plugs.

Out of plywood, painted black, he made the grilles and covered them with speaker cloth. 

I had to enlarge the bottom  hole,  which  meant  removing   the cloth. While it was off, I routed the tweeter and woofer holes on the wood so the edges were rounded. Hopefully widening the sound.

These are the terminal cups that I chose. You can fit some really large wires in there. Or, my choice, banana plugs.

He made these bases for them, you can see how thick the oak is and his quality construction in these images.

He had  screwed in flat metal feet, I replaced them with spikes. As usual, when some new speakers came along, I sold these. Coincidentally to someone that also lives in Maryland.

We have reached O! No, not that kind of O. These very attractive speakers were made by Onkyo.

D-062AX are their model numbers. I like that they are mirror imaged. Some say the best sound comes from speakers thus built.

This photo gives the impression that the cabinets are tapered front to rear, but they are parallel.

Such a nice veneer they chose for these. Probably not real wood, but they look nice.

Another point in their favor are these factory terminals.

Some of the more famous of Radio Shack speakers are these Optimus LX5 models. 

Linaeum true ribbon tweeters are said to provide 360 degrees of sound.

 Note the proper speaker terminals on these as well.

All covered up and ready to play. I had replaced the woofers on these as I still had not attempted to replace foam. They sounded great.

This is one of the "Big Speakers" that I was using in the living room. My wife spent $300 on BOSE 301 Series V speakers hoping I would stop using these. I did not.

Fifteen inch woofers, I have only seen  one other pair of Optimus PRO 4000 speakers in photos or for sale. I believe these are descended from the MACH series of Radio Shack speakers.

I was using a 250 WPC Adcom power amplifier with these speakers. One day, there was no sound from the left channel. I found the fuse blown in the amp. I pressed on the woofer cone and it did not move. Uh, oh. I removed it and after much effort performing the necropsy, I found the voice coil had overheated.
Since no replacement woofer could be found, unobtainium, I parted them out.

A bar owner bought the lot and said he was going to build some speakers for the bar with them. Everything looks very similar to the components from the MACH TWO speakers, except the tweeters.  Those parts can be seen in PART TWO.

Fear not! The cabinets lived on for a while, such beautiful walnut veneer. I installed the Lyric/Eosone cabinets inside them. Horn tweeters are simply to fill the holes.

"P" speakers will conclude PART THREE. Since there are a number of them. After doing all that follows, there are still more P speakers waiting. So, I will end it with Philips.

Starting with Paradigm. A revered name in home loudspeakers.

These are their MINI MONITOR speakers. I don't remember what was wrong with their tweeters. So I found these with similar efficiency.

Proper terminals and large rear facing reflex ports. I like the transparent woofer cones, too.

These larger ones are model 5ee Mark II. Model number is not exactly clear in the photos.

Calling these wee speakers TITAN seems tongue-in-cheek to me. Found them in the original boxes. 

After listening to them for a while, I loaded them back in their boxes and passed them on.

Philips is another venerable name in audio. Creator or co-creator of whole formats of recordings, such as cassette tapes, CDs and SACDs.

Below are two sets of very attractive Philips speakers. Both sets were part of a small system, shown here from a Photo by Philips:

Quite a nice looking kit. I suspect the kit sold for a substantial price. How well the electronics performed, I do not know.

Yes, Ribbon Tweeter Technology. They sounded very good.

Again, perhaps not real wood veneer. But maybe real. They did a nice job above matching the veneers.

Again, look at the veneer matching below.

Nicely rounded ports and good and proper speaker terminals.

This is also a Philips photo of the newer system which was a hybrid of a tube preamplifier and Class D digital power amplifier. I've read the amplifier was troublesome.

Now with a dome midrange larger and rounded cabinets. The tops of which are dark tinted poly-carbonate sheets of some kind. To avoid rings from drinks or plants, perhaps?

These actually sounded very good. I should have kept them.

Hard to appreciate the beauty of the cabinets in these photos. They are so reflective.

There are still more P speakers to be shown. But I do not like my articles to run too long. So, PART FOUR will continue with P and go to..........

Thank you SO much for taking the time to read my word and view my photos (and Philip's, this time), it is labor of love. Now If I could just figure out how to get paid for this...........

Scott
November 3, 2018

#285