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Tuesday 29 January 2013

A bit on the "calm" side recently...

There hasn't been many posts recently, I know. But things happen in life so I simply don't have time to make blog posts.

A short summary of things I should make blog posts about but haven't had time for. It will come though, eventually.

  • LG Nexus 4 smartphone short review
  • Koss Porta Pro headphone review
  • Swapping powersupply in my computer to a more silent one
  • Room measurements with REW and an Audyssey mic
  • I have gotten a job
  • Thinking of finishing one of my 41Hz amplifiers, most likely the AMP10-Basic
  • Plans of building a measuring mic based on the Panasonic WM-61A

As you see in the list there's a quite time-consuming point in there. The one about the job. I have gotten a job at a company that books travels for people. Not holiday travels but more like to and from hospitals and such. At the moment I'm just learning the job, and it will be that way for a month or so, but afterwards I'll start working weekends and evenings. This steals away much of my time.

Another time consuming thing is the whole workout and fitness stuff. Working out 5-6 days a week and making sure I get enough sleep also takes away much of my free time. Luckily I have fewer classes at school this semester so there's hopefully less schoolwork now. I still have six physics classes per week which will require some home studying, writing reports and essays and such.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

"New" speakers again!

No, I'm not selling my Oy speakers and building something else. It just feels like I have new speakers again.

I'll start the story from beginning, instead of starting in the middle, going towards the end and then finishing with the beginning as I did on diyaudio.com earlier today.

I have always had a feeling there's something wrong with the speakers. Very bass-shy and diffuse soundstage. And on the first days when I was turning the speakers against eachother with a ~2cm gap in between and connecting them out of phase I still had a decent output when playing 20Hz sine waves. Not loud, but it was enough to disturb people around the house. But I didn't care more about that. I was just thinking they were bass-shy because they needed more burn in time.

Back to present time. While cleaning my room last friday I found a bag with sealing gaskets. They were supposed to be around the driver and terminal cutouts. So today I had some spare time so I assembled a table to work on and I opened up speaker number one, the one with the damaged baffle. Everything was fine, all cables connected as they should be. But on speaker number two I found the problem. The upper woofer was wired out of phase. Apparently I was in such a hurry to get them up and running so I didn't have time to double check the polarity. So I added the sealing gaskets, mounted the drivers and double-checked the polarity and WOW what a difference!

In theory I should have twice as much bass now than before, and boy I do! I can feel it easily in my chest even at lower volumes. Before I had been playing them without any damping material in the ports, but now I put in all of it and I'm almost thinking of adding some more to further attenuate the bass.

Another thing is the soundstage which got improved a lot. Now it's possible to hear where the musicians are on the stage and it's just wider, deeper and larger in general.

And here's some pictures of the sealing gaskets






Friday 4 January 2013

Trying the speakers in the living room


Trying the speakers in the living room during the LAN-party. Sounds good so far, and it's getting better for every hour.

Thursday 3 January 2013

After several hours of sanding I'm finally done!

I'm finally done with the HAD Oy speakers!

No pictures in this post, that will come later. Neither will I make any comments about the sound because I want to give them at least 100 hours before commenting the sound. But I can say that they can play loud, louder than my ears can handle, and that I'm not used to listening to speakers that have tweeters ;)

Tuesday 1 January 2013

Almost "done"!

This will be a quite short post, mostly just facts so I can remember what I've done when it is time to write my report for school. Quite tired after a long day, you see.

I started with screwin the filter to speaker number one.


Then I added damping material to the side for speaker number one, and cutting away some for the braces.
I also added some hot glue to the bolts on the filters, just to keep them in place.


Added some clamps to hold the cable in place.


Speaker number one is being glued. Didn't need very many clamps for this, the weights were enough. The garden stones weight 14kg each. I have also dampened the second side panel. The brace is higher up in the box in speaker number two, as you can see in the cutouts in the damping material. It accidentally became like that, and I noticed it first after I had glued them so I couldn't be arsed to fix it.


When speaker number one had gotten some hours to dry I carried it to the garage and spent about 1½ hour sanding it. First a run with 40's paper to do most of the work at some places. Then a run with 120's over all panels and joints. I also spent 10-15 minutes carving away glue. Thick pieces of glue can't be sanded really, has to be cut away.

Then I carried them back in again and it was time to mount the terminals. Problem!
The spade connectors were too small. There was too little metal to drill the holes larger so I had to cut them off and replace them with bigger ones. Luckily I had a few centimeter more cable than I needed.


Small vs big one
With the new ring connectors I mounted them to the terminal. Problem again, see the picture. I was just about to go ask dad for help and advice but I came up with a solution myself. Why shall the cable point down when the filter is above the terminal? Loosen the bolt, rotate the connectors 180 degrees and it's fine. Four screws later the terminal was fixed in place.



Up and running!
It was quite funny though. Mom, dad and my brother had been saying "What if it's dead quiet when you turn it on for the first time" and I've been saying that it wont. Guess what happened, it was dead quiet. The Mar-Kel speaker on the right channel was playing fine though. Checking the speaker cables twice, everything is fine. Decided to connect the left Mar-Kel again and see if it works. No it didn't. I check my Reckhorn active filter and a cables has come off. Probably because me and dad were lifting the amplifiers earlier today when we needed the garden plates. Put the cable back in and everything was fine.

I wont comment about the sound yet, I'll play them for a couple of days before I will write about the sound. All speakers sound like shit when the drivers come straight from the box never being played, so I'll try to play them as much as possible in the coming week and wait for them to loosen up a bit.