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What internal speaker wiring to use?

I've been listening to my P.E. Leon Integral speakers for about six years now. They are a 3 way 5th order design using Focal drivers. The internal and external woofers are 8". Usually I listen to jazz classical and pop with my Micromega Solo CD player, Audio Research LS1 pre, and Classic 60 power. Interconnects are Tara Labs Ref Gen 2, and speaker cables are FMS zero core. Inspite of some of the "old" technology, the openness and detail, coulpled with the very tight bottom end of these speakers is astounding. (In particular if driven with a good 150W solid state amp, the control and tightness of these 8" woofers is better than I expect.) One day I moved the speakers down into my home theatre (some might say a huge mistake; Marantz SR14EX) and got carried away with a buddy blasting Santana's Supernatural DVD. To make a long story short, after the smoke cleared, one of my resistors in a crossover had burned. Seemed like a good time to do some tweaking so I changed the wiring from its original individual runs of +ve and -ve mystery wire 14G teflon insulated to woof/mid and 16G teflon insulated to tweet, to Kimber 8TC and 4TC. Now the sound is far less detailed with less air, a bloom in the mid range and definetely looser bottom end.
Lesson learned. Sorry for the long post, but has anyone got a recemmendation for wiring inside my speakers? This was one helluva lot of work for a poor outcome. (Stripping all of those wires on the Kimber was a particular pain!). I've let the system play for four solid days while I was away from home so I hope the wiring should have burned in if such a thing exists. Help!

Many thanks in advance for your replies.

Perry Gall
perrygall
3 responses Add your response
perrygall OP
1 posts
 
Thanks for the responses. I have contacted the manufacturer in France and Pierre is willing to send new wire to me for no charge! Guess he doesn't want his work to sound as they do now. As well as that reason, he's just a good guy.
Ezmeralda11: You're right I should have mentioned the resistors. They were both replaced with new resistors of the same value and tolerance. I checked the value of the remaining good resistor, (it matched its markings) and matched the new resistors to 3 decimal places with a good Seimens multimeter. All joints were soldered very carefully with WBT silver solder from The Parts Connection, and polarity was checked against a schematic supplied by P.E. Leon. The speakers sound identical now, just like crap unfortunately. How do you feel about the burn in? Do they need weeks instead of days?
ezmeralda11
303 posts
 
The effects of an amplifiers damping is relatively insignificant, let alone any effects the cable may impart. The difference between a damping factor of 750 and one of 1750 is only a .5% change in the amplifiers control of the speaker calculated on a typical impedance. Whatever dielectic material is employed can be accounted for in any discussion on capacitance, since that's exactly what the different energy storages are about. However, I doubt capacitance had anything to do with it. You changed a resistor in one of the crossovers and cable in both??? You didn't give all the details. You never even said you changed the resistor at all but I'll assume. It could be that the speakers are not performing identical anymore if that resistor had anything to do with it, unless you changed the one in the other speaker for the sake of consistency. Speaking of which did you replace the resistor with one of the proper value? If this may be the culprit, listen to each speaker at a time (mono) to see if that may have anything to do with it (assuming you only fixed the damaged one)? Also, check you soldering work? Did you miss something, bad connection, did you reverse polarity somewhere? With all those wires none are touching one another are they? Also, are you sure the only thing that got damaged was the resistor?
sean
6,231 posts
 
Go back to using the original wiring. The speaker was probably voiced or designed with what was in it. I hope you made detailed notes as to where each wire went, the orientation of each wire, etc... I always, always, always recommend doing such when "experimenting", especially in cases such as this. Any manufacturer that goes to the trouble to select different gauge wires for different drivers and pays extra for Teflon dielectric as an OEM part knows what they are doing and what they want.

As far as i know, the first manufacturer to play around with such things was Arnie Nudell back when Genesis was but an infant. I changed the wiring in an old set of these and learned a long time ago that NOT everything can be improved by using "bigger, better & more expensive" parts. Sean
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