Rock the Garage!

**voice of the theater** · May 6th, 2012, 09:09 AM

I admit I'm jealous--I've been looking for a nice pair of Altecs for my garage workshop--great that you found those cabs for free! I'm curious what other Altec gear you have at home if you "found" a pair of 802-8G's in your closet and had a "spare" pair of 1209 crossovers at home too?

Not sure if I understand your setup--are you saying that you have your 811 horns 10 feet above your 816 cabs or are you hanging the 816's too?

**Alien_Shore** · May 6th, 2012, 11:00 PM

I was pretty blown away when he said he was going to just trash the 816s. He said they were very old and heavy and not to hurt myself loading them on my truck. I've picked up a few Altec pieces just like that - poking around at churches, or garage sales, or auditoriums. Most of the good things I got off ebay about 10 years ago...I got very interested in Altec gear back then and just snatched up a few auctions. Really wish I had purchased more then, since the prices have shot up so much!!

Anyway, the garage setup is pretty crappy right now. I hung the horns up in the corners, but the bass horns are sitting on the floor, stacked on each other. I need to find a way to separate the 816s and get them close to the corners, but it will be very hard to do since they're so large. Those 416s are some really wide-range speakers! So the sound is pretty mushed up right now. Plus those dividing networks need to be re-capped at a minimum, and I'm not too sure about running the 16 ohm loads in combination with the 8 ohm loads; it's probably not a good idea, especially as old as the XO networks are...

-Mike

**gearfreak** · May 7th, 2012, 06:39 PM

Good score, and no signs of mouse poop, to boot.

...clearly I need to do more ice skating during mass

**Alien_Shore** · February 9th, 2013, 08:59 PM

OK - been working on the XO for this setup.
Up until now, we've been using the 1209-8A networks. Those are pretty dang good, but I wanted something more specifically matched to these drivers and horns. So the exercise has been to play with variations of the 1209-8A, and then I just went to the drawing board and started from scratch. I played with several custom XO designs and still wasn't quite happy with the sound. Finally broke down and drug the active XO out there and tweaked with that until I found something that sounded as good as I could get it (used the wife as the choosy listener since her ears are still like a cat!). That exercise wound up giving the the ground work of a 900Hz XO point, with 12dB Butterworth on both HF and LF.

Then it was over to PCD and model the thing in there, then build some prototypes, etc.

Finally landed on a solid XO that is performing like the active:
new900hzxo

**Alien_Shore** · February 10th, 2013, 12:29 AM

For those interested, here's the schematic of the XO:

**cradeldorf** · February 10th, 2013, 03:56 AM

PCD Is the Bomb!! I'm running the crossovers I did in it. Nice work Buddy.

Do they sound good? Or have you not built them yet?

**Alien_Shore** · February 10th, 2013, 03:56 PM

Originally Posted by cradeldorf

PCD Is the Bomb!! I'm running the crossovers I did in it. Nice work Buddy.

Do they sound good? Or have you not built them yet?

Thanks CD. Yeah, I have one channel built, still tweaking and deciding how I want the "finished model" to look. It sounds very good. The last change I will make tonight is to put in a variable resistor for R1 in the notch filter to be able to dial in the upper mids. And yes, I've very glad you put me onto PCD!! I'm very pleased with this software!!