Black pile o' stuff from the 90's

Did the black gear from the 90's do everything wrong? I guess it depends on who you ask. I'm certainly happy.

Speakers:
JBL 250Ti LE
This was a local barter town deal. Can I just say that barter town and the local AK member is awesome? They are fully functional after very little work. Neutral is the word I prefer to use with these. "Laid back" is not the words under the right conditions. If you feed them crap, that's what you'll get.

Amplifier:
Harman Signature 1.5
This came from Greg Timbers as he was doing some upgrades. I thought it was a neat fact being that I have much respect for the guy. No doubt in my mind that this has brought the speakers close to the dynamics they are capable of. I've got to add that an AK member somewhat steered me towards the design of this amp.

Preamp:
Adcom SLC-505 passive pre.
This was a decent auction deal that had no other interested people. Not much to see here. It has an ALPS blue velvet pot. Basically it serves an attenuator or "throttle limiter" for all idiots including myself. I've run it wide open and there is no perceived degradation of sound when attenuated.

Crossover:
This is a DIY PLLXO/Active hybrid. The filter is set at ~70Hz. The PLLXO is just a handful of passive components in the signal path to the main amplifier.

Subwoofers:
JBL PS-1400
These were from the Harman clearance shelf. Now we know every last bit isn't from the 90's. I purchased them for the drivers, but they have not really moved since I've unboxed them. The filtering on the plate amp is bypassed to use the active crossover listed above. You may wonder why in the hell I would use a like driver here. They simply serve to take the LF load off of the main amp. There is a short list of benefits to doing this. They are also well behaved in my particular room.

Source:
A Dell mini 9 and Lavry DA-10 dac has replaced the Squeezebox Touch. A Teralink usb converter and transformer is connected to the AES input. The Dell mini is running squeezelite and foobar.

Cables:
The interconnects are bulk package basics from Parts Express. The speaker wire was on clearance from the same place. It's 12 gauge with a high strand count.

The Room:
It's very much open to the room behind my head so I've included that space. It's ~14' x 25'. Nothing special for treatments yet. I'm in experiment mode here. There is whatever I have on hand temporarily placed for first reflections.


I know I shorted you on the pictures. I'll see what I can do about that.

The people, reading and learning here at AK is always great. An obvious contribution to what happened here. I went through upgrades and chasing a particular sound like most of us. Nearly all of this system has been tried and settled for over a year. Maybe I've just been too busy:scratch2:. Upgrades are always on the brain, but they are viewed from many different angles now.

Harman Signature 1.5 + JBL 250Ti LE

Holly molly! That is some awesome rig you got there.

:worthless

That would require buying a camera. Low item on the long list

grey,
I have no problem reading. Your post is not worthless w/o photos.
I have had good synergy w/ HK and JBL too. (hk870 and JBL L1)
I've used passive preamps in my previous tube system, but prefer the body an active pre offers to ss amps.

mjcmt said:

grey,
I have no problem reading. Your post is not worthless w/o photos.
I have had good synergy w/ HK and JBL too. (hk870 and JBL L1)
I've used passive preamps in my previous tube system, but prefer the body an active pre offers to ss amps.

Click to expand...

Should be a nice match. You will never run out of power there. I've used the older brother of the L1, the 18Ti in near field. Liked that quite a bit.

Regarding the lack of "body" with passive components. Can we rationalize that as lack of low frequencies? This happened when I first used the Adcom. The use of the passive was purely accidental. It was intended to be used with an active crossover main channel.

What fixed the problem was adding a resistor across the outputs after the PLLXO. That was not intuition either. Something else that was accidental. It sounds like a nice impedance match. The passive crossover channel is 6dB slope. It only consists of a capacitor and resistor for each channel at this point. I had to change the crossover point and level slightly on the active sub channel. The cabling was kept short with low capacitance. What may also play a factor is a source of 2v while the amp only requires .8v for full output.

I've read plenty of terrible experiences with using passives. Rolled off highs, rolled off lows, lack of dynamics and then some. What would be interesting to try is a simple buffer stage. Going back to the active crossover I mentioned before. The buffer stages would be in an active crossover. That generally negates the need for buffers anywhere else such as an active pre.

The Pass "B1" circuit without any exotic components may best some of the expensive active preamplifiers out there. :scratch2:

Nice system, some good synergy going on there. The 250's are in Black gloss lacquer?

mech986 said:

Nice system, some good synergy going on there. The 250's are in Black gloss lacquer?

Click to expand...

Thanks and yes, all black stuff.:yes:

This is a link to exactly what I have:
250Ti LE

Hopefully I will have a camera whenever I do a sonic restore on them this winter. Not that they are bad off as they are.

managed to get some of the restoration done and updates

I wanted to make my source more versatile so I picked up a dac and Dell mini.
This is how it sits currently:
Office PC/Logitech media server>WIFI>Dell Mini 9(910)/Win 7/Squeezelite >USB>Emotiva XDA-2 DAC.

The Dell mini and win7 gives me the ability RDP in and run foobar with local flac files. Spent an hour and there stripping unnecessary stuff running on the o.s. It averages ~500MB free out of 2G. Very quiet solution due to the SSD and it's fanless. I leave the Dell upside down as it runs cooler this way. With foobar running, this is THE BEST I have heard out of this system.

All was fine for a couple of weeks after calling it good, then something happened. I started hearing a strange haze along with the vocals that just seemed happen from one day to the next. Surely it was something that I touched with all the recent changes?

I traced my steps back and cleaned all of the interconnect contacts along the way. Finally it was bad enough to point out a single tweeter.
The other one didn't sound spectacular either. Just a bit too hot.

I was well prepared for this day.:yes:
I pulled the tweeters and disassembled. Sure enough, the foam was hardened and the bad one started breaking apart inside. I had two new D8R35TIA phram kits stored away which are now installed. New foam could have fixed these up, but someone touched a dome before I got them.

A friend let her children in while I was away and they had their way with the mid-ranges. I now have these fixed up too. While I was digging out the phrams I also grabbed some brand new 104H mids that were rat-holed. Half of the drivers are fully restored.:thmbsp:

The results? The tweeter phrams are a dramatic change, but I expected this. New foam alone really cools them down and they have closer to natural sound to them. The midranges do sound tighter. A tiny bit more of the details are heard. More of a good cosmetic change than anything.

Order is restored. Now back to the

mjcmt said:

...Your post is not worthless w/o photos...

Click to expand...

You're right... it is ALMOST worthless without pics! It's like picking up a Playboy to read the articles.

Seriously, though... to the OP - thanks for sharing about your gear. We love some BPC gear, too! I adore my Denon stuff!

Yea, BPC is alright in my book too, especially if that's all you have to listen to.

Rome

janikphoto said:

You're right... it is ALMOST worthless without pics! It's like picking up a Playboy to read the articles.

Seriously, though... to the OP - thanks for sharing about your gear. We love some BPC gear, too! I adore my Denon stuff!

Click to expand...

It reads and sounds prettier than it looks right now. Not quite time to break out the velour robe just yet.

All of the gear outside of the speakers is not so neatly placed is in a well ventilated closest. Function over form here. I'm working on relocating the dedicated 30A circuit this week. The front wall is being remodeled as well. Parts of it have already been removed. It was originally diced up for a completely different entertainment system. It sucks for acoustics making one channel sound weaker. I've put up a temporary panel to deal with this for now.

I've picked up a nice fully enclosed rack recently for $70. It's rattle free and came loaded with some useful goods. Planning to massage this in as well.

Until I can get it all picture worthy, thanks for reading.

Jeff

Where's the black pile? :saywhat:

Hi all,

I have some updates to the system that happened ~6 months ago:

A Dell mini 9 and Lavry DA-10 dac has replaced the Squeezebox Touch. A Teralink usb converter and transformer is connected to the AES input. The Dell mini is running squeezelite and foobar.

The Teralink is not permanent. I'm still looking at usb converters. The Berkeley alpha, Yellowtec PUC2 and a diy effort are some possibilities in year or so. Dan Lavry mentioned that all of focus on input quality went into AES. The same goes for the DA-11.

The results? Worth it!
I had another dac in the system before this one. All of the previous digital efforts had a slight shouty/edgy sound in the midrange. The Lavry has resolved this. A dac that sounds natural and easy to listen to.

Aside from all this, the dedicated 30A circuit is in place and running.

Jam sessions are good these days. Merry Christmas to all and I hope you find some audio goodies under the tree.

Nice.

Love the title of your system, and love your equipment choice even more!

Thanks for the comments above. Man, time flies.

I did end up getting a Yellowtec PUC2 usb converter added to the system and I still owe all of you some system pics.

The most recent addition is a Marchand XM9 crossover from the big auction place. I bought this several years ago and just recently went through it. This assembly was obviously purchased as a kit and it was dangerous to even apply power to it. No wonder it was for sale as one of those "powers on, no further testing done" descriptions.

Unfortunately I do not have an entire picture of the innards before I started. Over 90% of the soldering was re-flowed or completely re-worked. I figured that it would take a quick 2 hours and that tuned into loosing count of how long it took after I started digging in. Some joints were cracked and some no real solder contact at all. Even the mains power at the fuse had no solder contact

My work is on the LH side for the crossover board pairs pics.

I found out that the boards only need a minor mod to convert the inputs to balanced. Being that the Lavry is balanced xlr out and I had no xlr panel connectors, I hacked in a pair. Note that the Lavry has internal jumpers for balanced/unbalanced selection for the people that own one. I also swapped the old part# op amps for some opa2134 that I had on hand. On to sound check.......


Success!

You may notice that any sort of preamp has been eliminated at this point. The Lavry is the only thing that limits the volume at the system and is the only source. The volume can be software controlled remotely with squeezebox.

On to the system pics......






This is how the system is controlled from the listening position. It can be done through the local Squeezebox LMS intranet site on the wi-fi laptop or through the Android Orange Squeeze app.
The LMS server is not pictured, but it is very simple situation. It is a desktop with an internal drive for the library. That drive is backed up to two external usb 3.0 drives. One drive stays on location and the other goes into an offsite safe.
Acronis true image coordinates the scheduled backups. The Dell mini is at the input of the usb converter and still works as described in my earlier post.



I will try to get some better quality pics later.

Less is more. Oddly not typically the mantra of the 90's.
Nice.

nice attention paid to your digital chain, your system looks like it sounds great.

The yellowtec interface gets a lot of praise, I considered it but ended up getting the gustard u12