mending things

 I routinely search ebay for bargain HiFi gear, usually once great brands now rather forgotten. A recent search yielded a pair of scruffy looking speakers but I recognised the old name of Audiomaster. They had been one of the 50+ UK speaker manufacturers that existed during the 1970's into the 1980's along with the likes of Tangent, RAM , griffin etc. Audiomaster were one of the first brands awarded the LS3/5a licence - the right to make speakers to that BBC specification, no mean accolade. The speakers in question were in a poor state, the tweeter looked heavily corroded, the bass unit had tears in the rubber surround, there were no grilles and the cabinets were quite scratched, but the seller made this all very clear. I put in a very low bid,  and won them for £3.  Collected from the nearby Town and the seller was great, collected and set about trying to restore them. First off after a bit of research I think these are Audiomaster Image Two speakers. The complex crossov...

Some months back, I did a silly thing and blew one of the drivers in my speakers. I think while fumbling with the wires between my pre and power amps I may have run a tape monitor into the power. Anyway, there was a loud noise and after that one of the Dalesford drivers in my RAM 200 speakers was damaged. It still worked but sounded wrong, and applying gentle inward pressure revealed it was rubbing on the voice coil. Basically the wiring had over heated. I looked around for a replacement but my challenge was that the Dalesford drivers are no longer made, and the RAM 200 used a special large magnet version of the driver. Some KEF drivers were considered a drop in replacement, but again, it would  require buying a second pair of speakers to cannibalise for parts, which also seemed wrong. I wondered if the speaker driver could be repaired, though I realised this was beyond anything I could do. I found a few places on the internet that could do the work, though some seemed to ta...

 I got back into vinyl records about 18 months ago, and have collected a few hundred albums, mostly second hand. I have a number of turntables (NAD 5120, Ariston QDeck, Pioneer PL12D ) which I got also second hand. I keep a few, some end up passed onto friends, some that are too far gone are kept for spares. In most cases they have required a little work to get them running again. Last week I was lucky enough to get a Pioneer PL-12D turntable from freecycle. The lady who offered it, said that she in turn had received it from freecycle , and had replaced the belt but couldn't get on with the springiness of it, and had got a modern USB turntable. I have previously worked on one of these decks, and know what she means about the suspension system used. While this blog is specifically about this particular model of deck, many of the concepts are similar to others from this vintage. Many Japanese belt drive decks throughout the  1970's shared very similar construction, so this m...