What is the problem? (1 Viewer)

[Marcel D.]

So I pulled these KLH T1B towers out of the basement and decided to give them another chance to see if I had any use for them. I hooked them up to my Pioneer VSX-D514 amp and played some music. Well they sounded like crap with piercing highs and a total lack of bass. I adjusted the amp for a while with no luck.

I then hooked the speakers up to my old H/K 503 stereo amp from the 70's and they sound so much better, almost enjoyable. The speakers are still crap but the diffrence was incredible. I'd like to know why my Pioneer amp made them sound so much worse?

 

[Seth=L]

Seems like that could happen if you had a cap that was leaking a lot of energy. Are the speakers bi-wireable?

 

[Marcel D.]

No they aren't bi-wirible. I'm actually listening to them again on the Pioneer and they distort quickly past moderate volumes, the highs aren't as bad as I thought but there is very little bass. Seems like this is affecting all my speakers since the Pioneer is my main amp.

 

[FeisalK]

What did you mean when you said you "adjusted the amp for a while"

could it be set to "small" front speakers and no bass is going there

 

[Seth=L]

If you say it distorts at moderate levels and you have no bass then you have a serious problem. Bass requires more energy to produce because it requires the most movement of a woofer. I would say I may have a bad Capacitor(as a guess), because when a transistor goes bad the receiver would normally shut down and blow a fuse, just as well the transformer would cause a shut down. Though don't leave the analysis to me. If you know someone who can test it for a small fee, then have it tested.

 

[Marcel D.]

Thats what I meant. I just went through the different settings like speaker size, location etc. to see if it would make a drifference.


Well I opened it up to see if any capcitors were bloated or venting but I found nothing wrong. I'm assuming now that this is just a low-end amp built with lower quality components and its probably time for an upgrade.

 

[Seth=L]

If it is a leaking capacitor, you likely won't be able to visually confirm the damage.

 

[Rory Buszka]

Look at the crossover of the speaker instead. See if there is any damage in there. This sounds like you have a low impedance return path somewhere. Test the crossover components with a volt-meter, as well as the woofer, midrange, and tweeter themselves. Look around for contacts that might be touching one another. If a single strand of wire is bridging across the terminals (creating the low impedance return path), this can also create a short-circuit path whose resistance is high enough that it's low power effects are not detectable, but when the power is cranked up, a significant amount of current is diverted. Sometimes crossover network PCBs produced by the UV-reactive process will get "hairlines" on them, which are typically caused by a piece of hair or dust being on the PCB as it is being UV treated in the etching process. I have seen several like this that passed a low-power frequency response test (at a tenth of a volt), but failed a 1-watt (2.83v) test.

If the receiver did not sound like this with other sets of speakers, then you should suspect the speakers.

 

[LanceJ]

What size/number of woofers in this speaker (I can't find it with Google)? What type of enclosure?

BTW: keep in mind many receivers and amps made in the 60s and 70s had a much warmer/fuller sound than today's designs. Some of that warmth was due to less advanced technology, but much of it was intentional (yes, amps can sound different if an engineer wants them too & this is not difficult to do). Amps and especially speakers that are extremely accurate are almost always perceived as "bright" or "in your face" (there have been numerous scientific tests done that confirm this).*

Anyhoo.............

When I used to listen to our KLHs in my HT retail days, most of them new out-of-the-box were very bright (especially one model with an 8" woofer in a very small sealed enclosure, a 5" midrange and a dome tweeter: holy crap you could give yourself a haircut with that thing!!). OTOH, that big 12" model Best Buy recently stopped selling sounded pretty balanced to me.

* so it is no surprise that the past few years many artists and studio engineers are using reconditioned vintage mics, modern tube-equipped mics, tube-based recording electronics, analog tape and software-based methods to make music that's more organic sounding and in turn, easier to listen to, even at high volumes. It may not be "accurate" music, whatever that means, but it sure can *sound* good, which is what the ART of music making is all about.