E-V speaker isse?

[TC Chris]

Long ago--maybe about 1963--I built a Heath AA-100 amp and AJ-41 tuner for my Dad. We put together Electro-Voice kit bass-reflex cabinets wit E-V LT-12 speakers in them. A number of years ago one f them sounded fuzzy--voice coil rubbing--and I torqued the frame a bit with shims to make it go away. Seems to me that speaker # 2 developed the same thing. They have had very light use, basically zero for the last 49 years.

So I'm wondering if maybe it's just gravity fro sitting so long, and maybe the cure is rotating the speakers so they are 180 degrees around? Can't imagine what else would have caused this, or what a better cure would be.

Suggestions?

I'll probably put these in storage when we close up Mom's house. Too cool to sell, and who wold buy them? Meanwhile, we're still sorting through vast collections of paper. Check stubs showing payments on the '51 Dodge, and the two payments @ $89 on the '51 Magnavox. Or the payments for "3 tons coal." When was the last time anybody heated with coal? Or the check for the first family dog: "one dog, $15.00." Later she penciled in the name we chose, since dogs don't come with names. "Happy." An apt description and name of a sweet, tolerant beagle.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

I had a radio with a speaker that must have gotten a little rust in the voice coil. It sounded funky when I first got it running, but it "fixed" itself with time running. IT never did cause me any more trouble until I sold the radio last fall.

[macgolf]

Chris,

From my experience woofer sag is not uncommon in larger speakers. I even had 2 pair of 80's British 8" 2-way speakers that suffered from sag. I make it a habit to rotate the large drivers in any of my speaker finds. I have a pair of E-V Aristocrats with SP12B/T35B combinations. I don't know if the triaxial design of the LT-12 would be more prone to sag but it's possible.

Oddly enough, my parents rented a house until 1970 that still used a coal fired boiler. My job was to take the pail of cooled cinders to the garage driveway. That isolated driveway led to a single car garage. At some point in time I was old enough to trust with shoveling out the cinders and loading new coal in it myself. Dad would buy a pickup load at a time and we had a short coal chute into the basement.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane and for sharing this story.

Mark

[TC Chris]

I had been wondering about rotation. What I did previously was add shims to torque the frame enough to stop the buzz. Not the best solution....

My grandparents' house in Alabama had a coal-fired steam boiler with an Iron Fireman stoker. Must have been a complicated arrangement to make it work. All mechanical and analog. I was too young to remember anything about how it operated.

Chris Campbell

[hermitcrab]

I have a 12" woofer out of a fisher console , the spider itself seemed to have warped or deformed from sitting ... I tried wetting the spider and letting it dry while supporting the spider at normal position.. and it seemed to work for a while and then the buzz started again. I ended up replacing it with a made in china version ....

[Hydrolastic]

Hello all, Wondering how much of this i am encountering three of the consoles i have are the smaller AMP 175 units with the 57 series preamps. In theory since all three have been recapped they should sound similar. This is not the case the 1 st207/8 has great mid range sounds clear but just is weak on base and treble. The 2st208 had weak base until i put in the concert grand woofers it a lot better but is no ground pounder like you would think. The 1st203 however is a creampuff and literally was owned by a school teacher. It was actually running when i got it i was told but i had it recapped immediately. It's running now and it has the best sound (overall and bass) of all of them including the continental.
Messing around with the speakers, I have come to realize its all about speaker condition. I now press on the cones to make sure they work freely. One i have is stuck/frozen but i noticed that some move more freely than others by hand. I also have a mid range set where the paper has gone soft from what looks like high humidity? (they rattle) I wonder also if the magnets can lose power? Anyway at some point i would like to purchase new equivalent speakers and see how much of a difference that makes. But for now (everything else being equal) it seems it is all about the speakers, how well they have survived the last 60 years and this determines how good the console sounds. Is this what you guys find also ? Hydro

[Firedome]

Most consoles of that period didn't employ acoustic suspension or correctly sealed and ported designs, so even large and sometimes multiple large woofers will not respond to frequencies much below 70-80 Hz in "ground pounding" fashion.
In general this had to be true to in order to prevent major acoustic feedback to the record players housed within the same cabinet.

[electra225]

Magnavox put a little shelf under the changer, made of masonite. If you remove that little shelf because it's a pain to re0install, you might get noise from the speakers in your phono cartridge. Don't ask me how I got so smart......

Chris, my grandparents had a furnace fired by an Iron Fireman stoker. We went to Linton, to the 4th Vein Coal Dock, and paid something like $1.25 a ton for oiled stoker coal. It was crushed coal, about an inch in size. It was oiled with used motor oil and kerosene. This was dumped into a metal hopper in the basement that would hold about five tons, enough for a couple months if it didn't get below zero much. The furnace was jacketed and had a blower on it. The stoker was a metal box with a 3/4 horsepower motor on it. You would open a little door on the storage hopper so coal would run in and fill the stoker hopper, usually a couple times a week, unless, like I said, it got below zero, then you had to do it every couple days or so. There was a auger in the stoker that went into the furnace, about three feet off the floor on our furnace. The stoker would auger the coal into the firebed. Grandpa would take a poker and bust up the "clinkers" what was left after the coal was burned. There was a shaker in the bottom of the furnace. There was an insulated handle you would put on the shaker to shake out the clinkers. We would put the clinkers in a coal bucket, then haul them outside and put them in a mud puddle, or on the road back to the orchard. Grandpa hauled a bag of clinkers in his car in case he got stuck in the snow. You could put clinkers under the wheels and they would grind up and get you unstuck if you were on ice. The Iron Fireman stoker had a dark green porcelein finish on the hopper, very fancy. When my uncle restored grandpa's house in 2014, they restored the old Iron Fireman furnace and stoker. The Amish rebuilt the firebox on the furnace. The stoker needed a new auger and some bearings. It would still work like new if you could still buy stoker coal. They put a propane "helper" furnace in the house, just in case. Probably a good move. The furnace and the stoker both had that porcelein finish cabinet or jacket on them. The suggestion has been made to fire the old furnace with wood pellets. My cousin lives in the house. I don't know whether they tried wood pellets or not.

[TC Chris]

Granny's Iron Fireman was green that i do remember... and not much else.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

I found this just for you, Chris. I thought you might enjoy it.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=ir ... &FORM=VIRE

[TC Chris]

Oh wow--steam heat and durable technology, two fun subjects! My current house has a hot-water boiler with a fan-forced exhaust for higher efficiency, but my old house back in Lansing had a two-pipe steam system and a convection flue gas exhaust. I always figured that if the electricity went out, I could manually open the gas valve and let it fire until it reached pressure, then enjoy the heat until I had to repeat. But the new one with the fan for flue gases, no. But out in my shop, the gas wall furnace has no electric demand. No circulating fan, no exhaust fan. No electric thermostat or gas valve. As long as the thermocouple is working and the gas flows, it will heat the shop. If disaster strikes I can go out and camp in the shop. If I move enough stuff out of the way....

Chris Campbell