ephori posted:

Also have a look on Etsy for speaker stands. There’s a huge variety and you can probably find some specific to your model of speaker. I got some steel stands for my hundred-pound Altecs off Etsy made by a dude in Poland, sized exactly to my cabinets.





[Edit] the catch is it took five months to arrive

ephori posted:

petit choux posted:

Oh wow, Altecs, as in Altec-Lansing. I don't know if I've ever seen anything so nice by them.

BigFactory posted:

Another member of the MA-5100 club. Good stuff

ephori posted:

They’re Altec Lansing duplex drivers but in JBL C50 cabinets that I salvaged. It’s a long story. Eventually I want to get them in proper homes, but I’m leaning towards DIY since original Altec 620 cabinets that aren’t trashed are ridiculously priced.



Almost, it’s an MA-230 but same vintage.

ephori posted:

ephori posted:

They’re Altec Lansing duplex drivers but in JBL C50 cabinets that I salvaged. It’s a long story. Eventually I want to get them in proper homes, but I’m leaning towards DIY since original Altec 620 cabinets that aren’t trashed are ridiculously priced.

Enos Cabell posted:

Enclosure from Serbia showed up much sooner than expected. I'm very pleased with the quality of the work.

petit choux posted:

How about Epicure speakers? I got these speakers with a three-way switch on the back for the Tweeter level. Never seen anything like it

Also found a new Mark t t i

large hands posted:

Epi/epicure/human speakers are great, I just left that switch on normal/off on my Epi m400s before I blew them up. The designer still sells parts and will refurbish them too, I believe

petit choux posted:

Well that's good because somebody took the midranges and put in really lovely ones. I'm kinda thinking maybe I can combine some of these I've been finding into one decent pair. And I assume the fact nobody's responded about the Numark indicates its value to you, hell it was only like $8. I also got a black Fischer TT but I'm too exhausted to go photo it RN. I just moved about 750 records from the apt. and I had to carry them all down stairs.

large hands posted:

Have a look here:
https://www.humanspeakers.com

There's all kinds of history, diy speaker plans and other interesting stuff there as well as parts and services for sale

Sheep posted:

Did you get this from the Vintage Audio Cabinets seller in Orid, Serbia on Etsy? I have 2238 that needs a wooden home and this looks right up my alley if so.

petit choux posted:

How about Epicure speakers? I got these speakers with a three-way switch on the back for the Tweeter level. Never seen anything like it

petit choux posted:

Also got a pair of Yamaha NS-A635A speakers for 15. I thought they might go with this Yamaha subwoofer I've been using the past year.

I think when the dust settles here I'm going to ask this thread if the 4 speaker sets I've acquired in the past few days could be assembled into something really good.

strtj posted:

I have a pair of M201s that I use on a daily basis. They're pretty darned good for home speakers from the time period (early-mid '70s), though they're definitely in the upper range of what I would consider reasonably sized.

The level control for the tweeters was a feature that several speakers from that time period had and frankly, they don't do that much anymore for a reason. Those pots/switches tend to wear out, get crackly, and generally just add more disruption to what can already be a fragile signal chain. The best thing I ever did to my M201s was rip out the old crossovers/level controls and replace them with the simplified version from https://www.humanspeakers.com.

strtj posted:

Those Yamaha speakers aren't terrible, especially for the price, but if you have better options I don't really think they're worth hanging onto. Please do post what else you found.

strtj posted:

Those Yamaha speakers aren't terrible, especially for the price, but if you have better options I don't really think they're worth hanging onto. Please do post what else you found.

petit choux posted:

ED: still seems odd to have such a large cab and have all that dead space up top but maybe that's advantageous.

petit choux posted:

Here is a dumb question I wanted to ask here. Do you cats and kitties use speakers A and B simultaneously (4 speakers, not counting a sub), or do you just use 2 speakers? Is it common practice to use 4 speakers, again not counting a sub, or what is the conventional use for A and B speakers then?

petit choux posted:

I could perhaps see an argument about having some kind of reverberation effect inside such an enclosure, maybe even some voodoo inside the box.

You know, another thread I read is the Trump thread and I've discovered most lately that a couple of goons over there are DJs who have built their own enclosures and stuff and I asked to see their setups and I was very impressed with the photos of their speakers, and they had some pics as they were building them, too. It was really cool. I think one of them, Virgil Vox, called his sub enclosures his "scoops." They reminded me of cowrie shells in their design.

But he's made me realize there are probably some really good speaker enclosure designs out there, not just for large setups like his. Are there any that are widely used, popular DIY speaker-wise?

large hands posted:

That seems to be a thing with 1970s EPIs, check out the m400(not my photo), the top half of the cabinet is empty.

BigFactory posted:

I have one room where I use A and B in the same room because I didn’t wire the speakers in series. I might fix that one day. It works fine though. Otherwise I only run 2 speakers.

strtj posted:

To touch on the "should I build my own enclosure" idea: if you're looking for a challenging DIY project for yourself, sure. If you have very specific needs for your space, sure. Otherwise it's pretty much not worth it - there's a lot of science that goes into speaker design, much more than just "let's figure out a reasonably sized box for this woofer," and anything even marginally mass-produced is going to be more economic than doing it yourself.

strtj posted:

Are you running four identical speakers? Otherwise I wouldn't ever wire them in series, I'd stick to using separate output channels. Even then I wouldn't consider it unless I was running two 8 ohm pairs; anything else would confuse almost any standard amp/receiver.

strtj posted:

Are you running four identical speakers? Otherwise I wouldn't ever wire them in series, I'd stick to using separate output channels. Even then I wouldn't consider it unless I was running two 8 ohm pairs; anything else would confuse almost any standard amp/receiver.

petit choux posted:

But would you use four 8 ohm speakers at once, is something I'm wondering. And more specifically, in the same room or space? Is this a common practice? I mean you can just forego all that and get a more contemporary system. Just wondering what the conventions about using speakers A and B might be.

BigFactory posted:

Yeah they’re four outdoor in-ceiling speakers. I’m never going to have one pair on and the other off so it would have made sense to wire them in series but now they’re installed so the odds of me pulling them out to rewire is next to nothing.

strtj posted:

Unless you're going to wire up something else on the second output channel, there is effectively no difference with most receivers. I really wouldn't worry about it.

strtj posted:

Alright, I'm on a roll here, let's brain dump.

Your average top 40 pop album is mixed to sound as good as possible in as many spaces as possible. This includes places as wildly incongruous as a dance club, your car, and even (until recently) a mono system like a lovely clock radio. It should still sound decent on your $5k home system, and in most cases it does.

Albums with a lesser budget were generally mixed to sound good in the space they were mixed/mastered in, which sometimes matches up with the sort of setup you might find at home and sometimes matches up to nothing that any sane person would have anywhere. There are albums that I maintain never went anywhere solely because the final mix was so lovely.

I always refrain from ranting on and on about how awful the Yamaha NS-10s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_NS-10) were, but you can read the article for yourself, and if you're really that interested in finding out what a wanker Bob Clearmountain was you can buy a pair for yourself.

The final point is this: start with something halfway decent and then figure out what works for you in your space. If you're going to spend real money, insist on a home demo. If you're really into one particular sound you can spend mega bucks to reproduce the sound of one studio in your space, but the idea that you can get one final super-expensive system to put all to shame is absolutely ridiculous. Even if you got something that measured ruler-flat in your very specific listening position, I'd bet hard money that the stuff 99% of people listen to wouldn't sound better, and might even sound worse.

strtj posted:

That's actually a really good question, and mostly the answer is "that's why things are mixed specifically for surround." Four identical speakers placed evenly in a uniform cube will give you a pretty fair amount of coverage, in that you can walk around the room and have uniform sound in a way that two speakers couldn't give you. But as soon as you change anything about that - different speakers, different placement, different room shape, furniture, etc. - you'll have frequencies fighting with each other. Even matched surround sound sets will have these sorts of issues, which is why you generally find surround sound mixes for movies - where impact is king, not exact reproduction - and not your average band's album.

As with all of these questions, it's not a matter of whether or not it can be done, it's a matter of whether or not it makes sense for the average person's time to be spent on it. Do you want surround sound? Cool, just get a surround receiver and hook up a few reasonably matched speakers to it. You can even turn on the "fake surround" presets to get a fun sense of room-filling audio for your favorite album. Do you want sound that is a super accurate reproduction of what the artist intended? That's a never-ending rabbit hole of chasing diminishing returns, and to a large extent is why the "make fun of audiophiles" thread exists.

Enos Cabell posted:

A composite to HDMI converter should work https://www.amazon.com/s?k=composite+to+hdmi+converter.

I've got a stack of old laserdiscs but haven't had a working player in probably 20 years. I do have a working RCA Selectavision player hooked up to my garage tv with several boxes full of CEDs though.

Enos Cabell posted:

A composite to HDMI converter should work https://www.amazon.com/s?k=composite+to+hdmi+converter.

I've got a stack of old laserdiscs but haven't had a working player in probably 20 years. I do have a working RCA Selectavision player hooked up to my garage tv with several boxes full of CEDs though.