Monitor Audio LCR Speaker

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Ok, I bought this speaker off ebay. GR center speaker. After finally setting up my rotel to get the center working I noticed that the treble was severely lacking, I mean SEVERELY lacking. Lots of checking this and that and working out it's definitely the speaker I noticed that the screws holding in the drivers were not all fully tightened. having just been ripped off on ebay I immediately got worried, have I been sold a fake speaker? No. I unbolted one of the drivers, sure enough solid silver internal wiring and all that jazz, monitor audio stamped everywhere. I laughed hard when I unbolted the tweeter, one of the wires to the tweeter had simply become disconnected. LOL, like any driver unit they are push fit crimp terminals so I just plugged it back in. It was loose so I gave it a squeeze with the pliers and it stuck. Put it all back together and now I have a working center speaker. my guess is, that the previous owner did something that caused them to need to replace part of the speaker unit, perhaps overdrove it and blew something I don't know. There is a (documented on the listing) chip in the veneer on the top left. I reckon they dropped it, the loose wire on the tweeter became detached at the went 'AWWW I broke it' and later thought 'better sell it on ebay then' hence the customary "provided that you have the patience of a saint and wait weeks for the driver elements to break in." part of the listing. Break in a second hand piece of audio gear? I think not. So this is a happy ending, would be BUT. I have one final nagging worry - not a problem right now as I am not bi-amping. during my testing to work out the issue I took the links out and drove the bass units and the treble units separately. Whichever terminals I chose it always powered up the bass units. When I had the tweeter running (albeit disconnected at the time) the two bass units still went, though not as 'vigorously'. More notably, if I held them still (not too much force of course) the sound from everything started to cut out. This made me very uncomfortable with continuing this experiment. The upshot is, I am worried that my crossover unit may be the worse side of fully operational. It's not a big circuit board and could probably be replaced quite easily - if it needs to be. Treble leaking into bass (and vice versa) might actually be an incidental effect and perhaps something the GS LCR improved upon or something (i.e. normal but not ideal). What I am worried about, as I will certainly be bi-amping at some point in the future, is amp 1 backfeeding into amp 2. The idea of that stinks to high hell in my book. I was thinking of giving monitor audio a ring tomorrow, they are fairly local to me (20min drive) so nipping in and such is not a problem.. I just wondered what you guys might think. By the way, Immensely chuffed about hearing, deducing and fixing the tweeter issue hehe 🙂

 

[Gerrardasnails]

Come on Mr P. How much did you get this speaker for? I have the silver centre (paid £185 brand new and it's great).

 

[Andy H]

A couple of years ago I snapped one of the speaker connection posts on one of my MA speakers.On further investigation all the XO was attached to the back of it. Fearing the worst (and an expensive repair) I contacted MA and they couldn't be more helpfull and posted me the replacement parts straight away. AND FREE OF CHARGE. Top people.

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="Gerrardasnails"]Come on Mr P. How much did you get this speaker for? I have the silver centre (paid £185 brand new and it's great).[/quote]

I paid the same + delivery for mine. not the cheapest I've seen it on Ebay, but it was buy it now so there was no faffing around.

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="Andy H"]A couple of years ago I snapped one of the speaker connection posts on one of my MA speakers.On further investigation all the XO was attached to the back of it. Fearing the worst (and an expensive repair) I contacted MA and they couldn't be more helpfull and posted me the replacement parts straight away. AND FREE OF CHARGE. Top people.[/quote]

Wow that IS good I'll definitely give them a call and see what they think.

See I'm a little worried about bass frequencies making their way to the tweeter (though that may not be happening, can't tell without the scope that I dont have) as that will give it a nasty coil-fartT (I just trademarked that term, for use free of charge on WHF forums🙂.

 

[Gerrardasnails]

That seems a good price to me for the Gold one.

 

[Anonymous]

yowser, replacement crossover is £129 quid . Shall be taking it down to monitor audio at some point to see if it does indeed need replacing.

Might just be a case of some sort of other short or perhaps a duff inductor or something...

 

[Gerrardasnails]

Mr P, I've just noticed that you have the same soundcard as me. Do you use a DAC or connect straight to your amp? Also, do you use it for surround sound duties too?

 

[Gerrardasnails]

I've also just read that the CA 840c player (that I am chewing over buying) can act as a DAC for other components. I assume this means I can send music from my soundcard to it and then on to my amp. This is good!

 

[Anonymous]

Well I can digital out to my amp and analog out. I do both at the minute and to be honest, my elite pro's dac sounds better than the rotel 1068's, noticeably actually. The elite pro is touted to have better dacs than the rest of the range though. As for surround, well I am still trying to get ahold of the special cable required to do this via analog. Those genius' at creative seem to think that nobody in europe wants surround sound from their card so don't sell the cable in Europe and refuse to post it overseas, how dense is that? mind you I never credited creative with anything but idiocy.

I can get dolby digital out from DVD's and certain apps, but not any games. How annoying.