I haven't been around for a bit (other things) but am happy to be back. A while back I got the plans for the 1 pis from you. I finally got the cabinets built and then hooked up the electronics yesterday. I put then into the system and have a problem. While these speakers are more efficient than the speakers they are replacing, they are playing at a much lower volume. Also, at not very loud volumes there is a bad distortion in the mid ranges. I cannot figure out what the problem is.

My system includes an ET foreplay into ET paramours. When I had this setup into the other speakers, ther was a bit of a hum, but not much. Now the hum is gone. I think this might be because the output volume is lowered.

I wired the one pis by directly connecting the woofer and tweeter to the binding posts in parallel. I also have the non-inductive resistor externally connected between the binding posts.

Any thoughts you might have would be helpful. The only thing that I could think of is that perhaps the impedance between the two different speakers is very different. In this case, I would have to open up the paramours and select different taps on the output transformers. I do not know if this type of impedance mismatch would give the result I described above.

Thanks in advance.

Gordon

Try to isolate the problem using a process of elimination. By that I mean try different things and try to isolate where the problem remains. Perhaps you have a bad set of drivers or maybe it's just a misconnection of some sort.

Well, I think I built the speakers correctly. I moved them to another stereo, one that I did not build, and is solid state. No distortion. I also put another input into the foreplay, and same distortion. Because the distortion is in both channels, the preamp is where I will focus. I will let you know.

Gordon

I have not yet been able to open up the speakers, but someone had suggested introducing a crossover into the speakers. Do you think this will help? You make many of these speakers. I am sure that if the crossover improved the sound, you would have put one in by now. I plan on focusing on the input to the speakers first but would like to hear your thoughts.

Gordon

The crossover in this case is mechanical, in that the normal rolloff of the drivers themselves provides the crossover. I've used both the tweeters and the midwoofers in each of these designs with crossovers when they've been incorporated in other systems. But in this case, you'll not gain anything. The midwoofer and tweeter are paired nicely, just the way they are and with no need for additional crossover components.

So I think you'll want to continue to focus on the preamps, amps and connections for the solution to this problem.

Gordon