keep us informed when you listen to them.
Ok, will do.
Inspection
Tuesday night was inspection...making sketches and note of items that need attention. There are only three of the most minor flaws in both cabinets combined, and you must be up really close to even detect them. Here is a photo of the XR6 (built in 1977 or 1979) standing next to the Thiel CS3.5 (built in 1988).
The Thiel is a tall 10" system and the XR6 a 12" system. Knocking on the Thiel cabinet with knuckles... it seemed more dense but it's tapered and slender. The McIntosh cabinets have the look and feel of high quality.. like fine furniture!!
Functional checks
Wednesday (last night) was functional checks with Audio Generator. CW tones were fed to each speaker in mono mode at the midband point of each driver, the crossover frequencies and several bass frequencies. There were no surprises as
everything worked including the BASS Comp section of the MQ 104. Here is a photo of one XR6 with power being fed to it.
Bad drivers
As already discovered at the sellers home, one of the
upper mids (UM) was dead. It measured as an open circuit with a DVM on the bench when disconnected. Below is a photo of the cabinet with the UM dome removed. The cabinets are truly in great shape!
When exercising the
woofers at 20 Hz using MQ104 BASS boost settings, and due to the deteriorated surrounds, the RIGHT woofer started to make an awful whop-whop sound like a UH-1 chopper in Vietnam. It had that familiar cyclic `whop-whop-whop´ and I figured it should be shut down immediately before any damage occurred.
Here is the UM dome on the scale. It weights in at 1.6 lbs. Figure a total of 4 lbs for shipping. :yes:
Dissimilar screws
A strange discovery.. the UM screws holding the GOOD upper-mid were undersized (6-32) with flat washers. They weren't tight at all, as the holes are for 8-32 screws, so there WAS a surprise!! No matter because ALL driver screws will be replaced with NEW black oxide coated stainless steel ones. Some of the Phillips heads are `lunched up´ and others are starting to rust slightly.
McIntosh Matrix
One last point of interest. Today at lunch hour I threw together a time line of the components here, with a few extras for comparison. See table below:
This might be a good point to start a
XR6 Love webpage. Maybe post here or host it on Comcast. It will be a fun project. These are NICE speakers and the hope is they will sound as good as they look!!
-Greg