What to do with Cambridge Audio Ensemble Satellites?

gmjungbluth

Dropping by my local Goodwill the other day, I saw these Cambridge Audio Ensemble satellite speakers sitting on the shelf. A little dingy but they were heavy, seemed to be in a hefty casing, and had nicer-looking metal grilles and solid 5-way binding posts on the back.

I picked them up for $7 and took them home. There was a set of crummy-looking longish boxes on the floor next to them, also from Cambridge, that were too beat up for me to consider.

Only getting home do I realize that the Ensemble system is meant to be used together - satellites and woofer boxes. From reading the forums the satellites sound good but drop off at about 150hz or so to the woofers.

I wanted to use these as mini-monitors or as rear surrounds but I'm concerned that the crossover is cutting too much low frequency - they sound pretty light in the lows as it is, even for such a small speaker.

Does anyone have any experience with these speakers? Would they be ok as rear surrounds even with a roll-off at 150hz? (My fronts are big and my sub is crossed over at 50hz). Is it worth trying a crossover mod to open these up? I'm already kind of interested in trying to refinish them so I would entertain some soldering if it wasn't too hard.

Thanks in advance!

tonyb

They probably work off the same type of system Bose does, the Sub contains the crossover and the Sats aren't meant to be used without it. Using them as surrounds seems pointless, re-sell them would be my first thought. Or buy the sub and use them in a bedroom/garage setup.

gmjungbluth

I've seen photos of the crossovers - they're definitely in the satellite speakers. I don't know whether the subs had them, but they were supposed to be wired in line from the amp.

tonyb wrote: »

They probably work off the same type of system Bose does, the Sub contains the crossover and the Sats aren't meant to be used without it. Using them as surrounds seems pointless, re-sell them would be my first thought. Or buy the sub and use them in a bedroom/garage setup.

zingo

I would only use them with a nicer desktop system. For example, I have a Monsoon 2.1 planar system in my office with a 150Hz crossover and speaker outputs built into the subwoofer. Speakers like those would go perfectly with something like that, but not worth using with a regular amp/reciever in my opinion.