New to me Almost Antique Swan IV D'Appolito

ALL212

Facebook Market is an evil place... don't go there!!

My son has purchased a house and of course he needs so audio equipment, speakers mainly. I found a pair of Swan IV oak finished speakers within an hour of here and they look great, sound a bit funky, but the cabinetry is outstanding!

Are aluminum wiring and wire nuts bad? 3 drivers but 5 pair of wire per speaker make questions come up?

As it turns out the mids are Focal 5N412's with dual voice coils so the extra wiring now makes sense. Rubber surrounds in good shape. But the wiring... ...

Tweeters are Focal T90k's.

1st speaker cleaned up ok. 2nd one done the same way...no tweeter. Speakers are glued in...backboard is extra thick and glued in. But no tweeter puts me in a spot so I peeled the felt diffraction rings back and did a bit of prying. Old glue! It finally broke free and clean. Now that it was clear of the cabinet I used my trusty VOM and found... they are wired differently. FFS... Wired the tweeter wire to the tweeter and now we have tweeterage.

But left channel has less volume... now what? So I emailed Madisound on a whim. Got the speakers just south of Madison and it's from a kit. And kudos to Madisound - I have documentation now. But that doesn't solve the issue of less volume and where do these extra wires really go?

So I took a chance - with the tweeter removed I could get to the edges of the mids and they also eventually popped out. So I've yanked out all drivers and wire. Madisound confirms that there were multiple versions of crossovers for these. I do not have the sub box portion but I do have the extra little 4mH board for the "boost coils" but they were wired in all wacky and I left them out.

Two of the mids have spade lugs, two of the mids do not. One Mid wire was broken off due to aluminum wiring, poor soldering and very short speaker leads.

They are now "naked". Cones, crossovers and wire removed. I've ordered new wire, caps and resistors from Madisound, hope to have those soon. And I'll wire in the 4mH coils when I do that.

F1nut

Are aluminum wiring and wire nuts bad?

Very. Are you sure the wire isn't tinned copper?

ALL212

Could be...but it's very brittle. E70148 type CL3 300v 14g. There was also some of same in 16g. But none of the 5 pairs were the same between the speakers. Almost like they ran out and couldn't find ...the 16g or the 14g and substituted the other. They may have been surprised by how much wire it takes to do these. I think they may have done them wrong also but I'm not sure. Length of wire between the speakers was also drastically different (Crossover placement was different also and that affected wire length as well). There's a couple variations on wiring these dual voice coil's in this speaker. I guess the early ones they ran parallel but resistance was pretty low. Now they recommend series and that's what I'll do (at least on the first try).

I've got 15g tinned copper coming in. I don't want to drop a pile of cash on these. If any of the drivers fail I'm pretty much screweged.

As to the wire nuts - rhetorical question!

skipshot12

Copper wire is preferred over aluminum. Silver is preferred over copper.
Aluminum wire will work fine if it’s sized accordingly but, any and all connections and terminations with aluminum must use bear grease… brush wire first to clean, grease then brush again before termination.

Coming from the power industry is of what I speak.
In audio… I’d go with what others say.

In a high salty environment stay with copper.

msg

skipshot12 wrote: »

In a high salty environment stay with copper.

Hear that, Ern? You can only be around copper.

ALL212

msg wrote: »

skipshot12 wrote: »

In a high salty environment stay with copper.

Hear that, Ern? You can only be around copper.

ALL212

All that crap got replaced with this:

https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-wire/supra-classic-1.6/bulk-cable-per-foot-15-awg/

westmassguy

Very nice work.