I'll donate to the repair cause. I was not aware that anything broke, but what the heck. I hope there's a next time.
Darn - sorry to hear about that. It is a shame that everyone does not practice the methodology of turning eqpt off before disconnecting and reconnecting, especially with anything to do with the preamp and amp.
I'd contribute to help as well if that helps. And I think we all understand the worst part is not being told about it.
This is awful and I can assure you of one thing right off as we sort this out, NO ONE in the room even suspected any damage was done. If we did damage we'll make it right, I promise you that. I will personally if need be.
Here's what I recall. We rapidly switched to the Kg's because the sound was not right and we weren't sure what was causing it. If drivers were blown that would explain the bad sound, but how that could have happened I am not sure.
We had two different CD players, the Marantz 7 pre, then the other pre for awhile, the SAE amp, and finally Kurtgo's amps. We had trouble from the outset with a dropped channel so we went through from front to back to diagnose. I can't tell you every step and I was never sure exactly what made everything come to life properly.
There was a moment when you came thru and warned us about those mids, and it was pretty soon after that that your speakers were offline and we were using mine in case there was a speaker problem. [Edit - by problem I mean already existing in the speakers] In between there - maybe it was what made you say that, you might have heard it - someone did disconnect either the source to pre or pre to power amp while it was turned on and there was a thump. I was in front and quickly turned off the power amp at that point because that's bad practice. After that the amp was always off when switching things and no more thumps.
I don't know for sure which amp but it was probably the SAE at that point, it was early in the day and Kurt hadn't brought his 300 wpc amps up yet. But we were swapping out pre's and sources and eventually amps trying to find the problem so they may have been there.
If you think that one live disconnect could have done it, that's the only thing I can possibly imagine. As far as any of us knew, all the eqpt was working fine when it got there, so we weren't testing unknown gear. [Edit: None of it was my gear but the pre and power amp owners were there and said all their stuff was fine.]
I would never, never have sat there till 9 pm and listened to music with you guys without saying anything if I had known.
Edit: If anyone else has additional info to add, please do.
Kurt, Chris, and I will go three ways to at least cover the money you had invested in them.Chris i realize this and once again i am not blaming anyone but myself.
"I would never, never have sat there till 9 pm and listened to music with you guys without saying anything if I had known."
Kurt, Chris, and I will go three ways to at least cover the money you had invested in them.
I see your point that it's not cost effective to source the actual drivers or even close replacements.
Let us get you some cash to take the sting out of the situation. The whole situation is a buzz kill for sure.
I've been travelling today so just catching up. Thanks for the comments Eric and I'm so sorry this happened. We should have taken them out of the loop as soon as you said something. Doing further post-mortem it was not just a question of whether the gear was OK but that we also paid attention to connections and power. I am not going to beat myself up over it as you very kindly suggest not to, but this will be a good lesson for all. It is a very easy situation to make mistakes: unfamiliar gear, multiple hands working at once, festive atmosphere, etc. It reminds me of the time at Jay's when someone was looking at a very expensive tube in the box, turned it over to read the bottom, and the tube came out of the open box onto the concrete. You just don't think someone is going to do that but in hindsight...
I too thought of at least making you whole for what you have in them. Please do continue to keep us posted.
I am more of a speaker geek than anything else and it saddens me to have such a pair of speakers damaged like that.
If there is any chance of finding the less rare drivers here at AK, ebay etc. let us know what to look for and the search will commence. Lord knows I have helped scores of people find drivers for their speakers, it is the least we can do.