New Heathkit AS101 owner - First post.

[alancohen]

BTW, do the two speakers sound (more) identical now that you've fixed the solder problems/replaced the caps? Have you cleaned the pots (with deoxit?) yet? Looking forward to your impressions once the tuning mods and crossover restoration/upgrades are complete. From your recent posts it sounds to me like they're really starting to sound great......

Yes I cleaned the pots with DioxIT. They seem to work smoothly, with no dead spots and no noise whatsoever. And I completely rewired the circuits replacing all wiring and cleaning up all soldering joints.

And yes, they now sound identical. I ran through a wide variety of music from my computer and they really sound amazing. I am very familiar with a lot of the music in my library and, as certain passages approached, I was eager to see what they would sound like. 95% of the time I was astounded. I even heard a few things that I did not know were there. I love that. Coltrane sounds like Coltrane, Frank sounds like Frank, but like they are in the room. There is something here that cannot be seen on a 2-dimensional frequency response curve. Music is 3, if not 4-dimensional. It's that added dimension that brings the sound out into the room. I'm just a little miffed that it took all these years for me to find this sound.

FWIW, my system consists of a source (TT or computer CD), a tube-based preamp, a 3W tube amp and some speakers. No EQ, no R/L balance, no treble and bass control. Basically, what you see is what you hear. That's the way I want it for now. I want a system that simply tells me what's there. Sometimes you get a crappy song that was recorded well. Other times you get a great song that was recorded poorly. Once in a while you get the best of both and it's magical. I'll judge the good sound engineers myself.

As far as the tuning, I spent a bunch of time with speaker design calculators when I built my first set of full-range speakers. They are 8" drivers and after much calculating and then trial and error, it was found that a 4" port, 4" long made for the best base reflex design. In the Altec Model 19, the port appears to be 2.5" x 11" or 27.5 sqin. Nearest I can tell the "port" (hole in the front) in the Healthkits is about 37.5 sqin. I reduced it about 15 sqin which seems a bit aggressive, but they sound awesome.

So I think I'll leave them like this for a while. My next project is a phono preamp kit and then a 15W OTL. Once I get the OTL running I'll re-access.