Rock the Garage!

[Alien_Shore]

So I was at a local skating rink and the owner was clearing out his storage closet.... He had 2 Altec 816A enclosures that he was going to dispose of, so I gladly took them off his hands!! Brought them home, and decided this could be a nice Saturday project to get some good sounds going in my garage.

Here's a look at the first one:


Crack open the back, and very pleased to find a big honkin' JBL E145-8 in great condition:


The JBL gets stashed in a box for safe keeping. The other 816 had a P.O.S. 15" woofer, so that one goes into the "get rid of" pile.
Now I have a good reason to break out some nice woofers and put 'em in. I pulled out the Altec 416A's and install those:


Oh yeah, those things look nice in there, and no WAF to deal with in the garage!


Next up, I pulled out some 511 horns, installed those 802-8g's I found in the closet, and hung them up baseball stadium style about 10' up in the corners of the garage:



Wired everything up with a couple of spare N1209 networks and WOW....the garage is ROCKIN'!!!

[gvasale]

does it get any better? Good for you.

[Audio_by_Goodwill]

I wish I could find stuff like that........ in pairs! I do find good stuff once in a blue moon, but always singles........Grrrr.

[mah]

Now you will never get around to painting the walls.

[voice of the theater]

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]

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]

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



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

[Alien_Shore]

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:

[Alien_Shore]

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

[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?