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"Breaking In" AKG 701s?

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David Pinnegar

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostTue Jun 22, 2010 5:16 pm

Hi!

:-)

Wouldn't the world be a sad and boring place were maturing to be engineered out of a good bottle of wine? Isn't half of the pleasure that keeping of it in the cellar until it's the right age, and then going through the process of filtering the sediment and above all, witnessing the improvement of the wine after opening the bottle and letting it breathe?

Is not the process of maturation in harmony with the natural order of everything?

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David P
http://www.organmatters.co.uk
David Pinnegar, B.Sc., A.R.C.S.
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pwhodges

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostTue Jun 22, 2010 5:29 pm

So long as you accept that like a bottle of wine, a speaker driver can go off!

Actually, it's as bad an analogy for speakers as I can imagine...

Paul
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David Pinnegar

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostTue Jun 22, 2010 6:24 pm

pwhodges wrote:So long as you accept that like a bottle of wine, a speaker driver can go off!


Dear Paul

Touchée

Aah! But what a way to go! :-)

In fact thanks to eBay I have just been able to track down new foam surrounds and even possible long lasting rubber surrounds for such beasties and have been taking apart a couple of units where I replaced the foam spider by some thin rubber sheeting a couple of years ago, with no visible deterioration. So these units are not going to be going . . .

However when I last repaired them I used superglue to hold speech-coil wires in place and I think it was either this or solderflux that has destroyed the aluminium or silver speech coil wire in the vicinity of joints. I'm now trying shellac which I'm assuming to be fairly inert. In any event, does anyone have any magic tricks up their sleeves for soldering copper wires to silver or aluminium wire? I'm simply making a tiny coil of the copper wire and using this to enclose the foreign metal, using surface tension to fill the coil and envelope the speech-coil wire. It works but are there any better techniques?

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David P
http://www.organmatters.co.uk
David Pinnegar, B.Sc., A.R.C.S.
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David Pinnegar

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostSat Jun 26, 2010 6:50 am

Hi!

I was researching drive unit design and noted a comment on a forum:
Give the speaker several hours of "break in" before forming a final opinion. Just like high grade audiophile speakers, it sounds a lot different after the suspension loosens up and the lows become fuller and more extended.


So . . . there you are in answer to this post. A fact of speaker-life with which musicians have contended for years . . .

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David P
http://www.organmatters.co.uk
David Pinnegar, B.Sc., A.R.C.S.
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Grant_Youngman

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostSat Jun 26, 2010 12:04 pm

I'm amazed this thread still hasn't died.

I hear a lot of things on forums, many of which tend not to be rife with sound (no pun intended) reasoning. The world will end in 2012, the world will be dominated by men in black helicopters, aluminum foil on your head will protect you from cell phone induced brain tumors, aliens from outer space live underwater in the Bermuda Triangle, the CIA created HIV ... :mrgreen:
Grant
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David Pinnegar

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Re: "Breaking In" AKG 701s?

PostSat Jun 26, 2010 5:27 pm

Grant_Youngman wrote:I hear a lot of things on forums, many of which tend not to be rife with sound (no pun intended) reasoning. The world will end in 2012, the world will be dominated by men in black helicopters, aluminum foil on your head will protect you from cell phone induced brain tumors, aliens from outer space live underwater in the Bermuda Triangle, the CIA created HIV ... :mrgreen:


... :-) Well I understand your scepticism - there's a lot to be sceptical about - but the bottom line is that if you haven't heard units which display this phenonomen, then you probably haven't heard the best of transducers. Transducers which display such properties have the ability to bring out of the signal detail that you wouldn't normally hear through speakers which have had subtleties engineered out of them.

When one is using cones and voice coils of no more than 12g mass, they are sensitive to subleties in the manner in which they are mounted.

If it's possible to fit in a trip to Nottingham in the coming days before next Saturday, I'll be demonstrating a speaker capable of doing justice to an organ in the greatest of detail next Saturday on the EOCS meeting. Sadly there won't be room in the car to bring back the pair but just one for the moment will be interesting. Does anyone in the UK know any man-with-a-van service who could move two pairs of _large_ speaker enclosures from Notts to Sussex during the course of this week?

Best wishes

David P
http://www.organmatters.co.uk
David Pinnegar, B.Sc., A.R.C.S.
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