John,
Reading through your thread I see you have tried quite a few things already. I will assume you’ve taken a flashlight and inspected your wires, both the front and back side. I also see you have experimented with different jumper material. The wording about your hooking up the resistors in place of the jumpers almost sounds like you hooked them up only to the tweeter attenuators instead of the mid-range attenuators. You might want to play around a little bit with different combination of resistor values and no resistors, and use some on the mid-range, if you haven’t. I have personally found that my setup benefited from some taming of the 400 to 500 Hz vocal range, plus a slight taming of overtones in the 1500 to 2500 Hz range. Not a complete cure, but a help. Then again, YMMV.
I’m really curious about the fact that you played Elton John on vinyl and it was terrible, but then you played a CD and it sounded great. That’s not going to sit too well with the vinyl set. But, that does lead my to my main question.
Do you turn your equipment off when you are not listening? I am definitely NOT a proponent of leaving amps on 24/7, so that’s not what I’m suggesting.
In my experience, my set-up sounds WAY more harsh the first hour it’s on than the second hour; and it’s the third hour when it really starts sounding great. I usually let it play for 1-2 hours before I actually sit down to listen. Are you letting your equipment warm-up sufficiently before you do some quality listening? I have found that the two hour mark is when my equipment finally starts to get into a groove. Before that, not so much.
Anyway, this may all be stuff you’ve tried a dozen times. Keep the faith. Your Maggies are too good to dismiss.
Tim
