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Post by MartinT on May 30, 2017 7:02:14 GMT
Something like these should have little insertion loss.
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Post by ChrisB on May 30, 2017 7:06:55 GMT
Looking for good quality adaptors, it's fairly easy to find what look like better quality 1 male : 2 female ones, but what I need is 1 female : 2 female. Also, when you look at how many of them are configured, you'll see that when you add three fairly stiff cables to them, they are going to take up a huge amount of space. For example, this is bad: This is a much better layout, but the construction gives pause for thought: Are any of them of decent quality construction? I don't know.
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Post by MartinT on May 30, 2017 7:42:22 GMT
Internally, they might not be that different. The 1-male:2-female types eliminate another cable. Will that not work in your system?
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Post by ChrisB on May 30, 2017 10:12:28 GMT
No not really, as I mentioned above, it's extremely inconvenient to get to the back of the pre amp to make cable swaps.
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Post by MartinT on May 30, 2017 11:40:34 GMT
Ah, ok. I thought, once in, you could just use the tail end of the cables differently.
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Post by ChrisB on May 30, 2017 13:08:16 GMT
I wish!
I also wish that for the ML amps, I could get hold of some CAMAC connectors that can take fat cable instead of the 5mm standard ones. That way, I wouldn't have to use adaptors at the other ends of those lengths of cable. RCA to CAMAC adapters are about 80 quid a pop, so I made my own.
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Post by MikeMusic on May 30, 2017 13:56:31 GMT
Technology. Even things that should not go wrong go wrong
Great you found the problem
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Post by ChrisB on Jul 22, 2017 12:11:33 GMT
I've just spent some time replacing the missing images in this thread. Thanks Photobucket, for giving me the opportunity to use one of your competitors. Good luck with your new business model.
Thread restored to something like its former glory.
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Post by ChrisB on Aug 5, 2017 13:12:04 GMT
A little package arrived from Japan this morning. It's a pair of Taket Batpure tweeters. John told me about these things a couple of years ago and I have been meaning to give them a try since then. After a fascinating chat about them with steveeb at The ASBO, I became even more convinced that they would be fun to try in my system. More to follow.
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Post by John on Aug 5, 2017 13:34:48 GMT
Be interesting to hear your results
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Post by ChrisB on Aug 5, 2017 15:42:16 GMT
I suspect that there's going to have to be a lot of experimentation John. My Mirage speakers are rather different to most. They have tweeters that are way above ear height. They've got one tweeter and one midrange driver firing forwards and another set firing backwards and I can't remove the grilles! I think I'm going to have to do some creative thinking.
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Post by John on Aug 5, 2017 17:13:01 GMT
I like that you will have to apply creative thinking I really would love to hear your speakers one day
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Barry
Rank: Trio
Posts: 195
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Post by Barry on Aug 5, 2017 20:31:26 GMT
How are you going to drive them Chris? Directly wired in parallel with your Mirages, or will you use a separate amplifier?
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Post by ChrisB on Aug 5, 2017 21:20:47 GMT
Hi Barry. Good question! I do have the luxury of having 3 good quality power amps, so either way is possible. At the moment, they are just plugged into the Mirages which are being driven by the Radford. I've played a couple of albums with a temporary lash up and it is very ìnteresting. They are just hanging over the front top edge of the front baffle on their wires, so firing above head height. There are some quite subtle things going on with the soundscape but I just noticed something with a vocal on a song that I previously thought I knew inside out. I now realise that it's double tracked. Well I never!
Interesting.
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Barry
Rank: Trio
Posts: 195
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Post by Barry on Aug 5, 2017 22:04:42 GMT
There are some members of AoS who are experimenting with these ultrasonic tweeters and reporting interesting results. Even though one cannot hear anything coming directly from the tweeters, they do seem to have subtle, but real, effects on the soundstage and imaging.
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Post by ChrisB on Aug 20, 2017 19:57:15 GMT
I've been in the garden today, cutting, bending, sanding and swearing. The job is to make a device to hold the Batpure supertweeters without them looking half finished. I have a crafty solution which is coming together. This will give me the option of three positions - forwards from the top, upwards from the top and forwards from the same level as the tweeters. As I also have rear firing tweeters, I will have the option of firing backwards from both the top and from tweeter height. I will also be able to fire to the side from the top but it will look silly!
The design will allow the addition of extra tweeters at a later date if I want them. I haven't worked out how to try them close to or inside the reflex ports and I suspect that in fact, the latter may be nigh on impossible.
More to follow.
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Post by MartinT on Aug 21, 2017 6:47:14 GMT
Interesting, Chris. We need photos (with or without the swearing).
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Post by ChrisB on Aug 21, 2017 6:50:57 GMT
Yes, I know but the light was bad by the time I had finished swearing!
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Post by ChrisB on Sept 3, 2017 22:38:50 GMT
OK, the Batpure project moves on. A little. I've spent some time proving the concept and learning the skills to (hopefully) turn the concept into reality. That last bit is where most of the swearing comes in! I've settled on the best position for a single unit being beside the tweeter. I have another pair hopefully arriving soon from John, and the obvious place to put them is to stick them similarly beside the rear facing tweeters and wired in phase, just as the rest of the Mirages drive units are wired. My solution to this is to make a shape from 5mm black perspex sheet (something which I have quite a lot of) that sits on top of each speaker and drops down to hang over the front and back baffles. The Batpures will be mounted on the rear face of the perspex, firing through an appropriately sized hole and the wiring will be following the shape but tucked tidily out of sight. The black perspex should blend in well with the black grilles and the piano black cabinets. So, first thing - I need two strips of perspex, each with two 90 degree bends in them. How the hell do you do that then? The only time I have ever bent perspex was at the age of eleven at school when I made a wood/perspex pen and letter holder (which my parents still proudly use!) We had the proper tool for doing this, which I don't own. It was a surface with an inset resistive wire that when you switched it on, it heated up like an electric fire element. You held your piece of plastic in place with your nervous 1st Year hands and when it got floppy, you bent it into the required position. Easy! All I have got is a paint stripping heat gun, so I tried using that to heat a section of plastic masked off with some chunks of timber. That was tricky! With some persistence, I got reasonable results but the radius of the bends couldn't be made to be consistent and it was tricky to get everything properly aligned and square. I suspected that it would be a piece of cake with 3mm plastic but I don't have any of that. Time for a bit of a think. My solution was to cut some 90 degree grooves into the plastic along the line of the bend. These were set at 2.5mm depth. I did this with a router - a tool that scares the crap out of me! Now, as long as the heat is directed vaguely in the right area, the grooves guide the whole process and when the 90 degree cut is closed up, you know that you have a square sided bend. That's the theory! My strips have a 45 degree chamfer on the back side, so as you can't see the edges of them when they are in position. I also made up some little pockets for the super-tweeters to sit into, behind the holes. More to come....
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Post by MartinT on Sept 4, 2017 4:58:24 GMT
Nice solution there, Chris. I remember when bending perspex at the age of 11 we had a heat box with a slit so that we could place the perspex with the line to bend over the slit. You could do the same with the paint stripper blowing through a slit in a piece of wood?
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