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Canton Karat 100

Schkarnitzel said:
Thanks James,
search shows none except one broken. Maybe 3154 from GLE 50, 60, 70 would be fine? Quick look shows that specs are the same with 1086.
I know it would be best to have all original parts but for me it is the most important to keep the same Canton sound. Maybe in the future I bump into some original.
What do you think?

And one more thing, maybe some advice to renew their black boxes? Is it ok to completely remove paint or just to gently sand it and apply paint?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I looked before I posted and saw at least 3 1086's there, all from ebay seller "Tone-Control". Odd that they don't show for you.
The 3154 will most likely be a reasonable substitute until you can find an original.

I have never tried to re-finish a cab with original black paint. I have stripped and re-finished several wood veneer cabs but never a painted one. The Karat cabinet will be bare MDF or particle board under the paint. I could only give an un-expert opinion that spot re-finishing will be hard to blend in, it would all depend on your level of skill with that. I would probably sand the whole thing and spray them if I was to attempt the job, but I have beginner level skills with that.

If you go unto your user profile and enter the country or state etc where you live then it is easier for members to help find parts.

Btw, Welcome to Audiokarma. :)

Cheers,
James
 
Hello friends,
I'm new here, I'm a owner of canton plus c and s and fonum 90, speaking of the karat 100 and quinto 510, is there any difference in sound between the two?
Kind regards
 
Nima said:
Hello friends,
I'm new here, I'm a owner of canton plus c and s and fonum 90, speaking of the karat 100 and quinto 510, is there any difference in sound between the two?
Kind regards
Click to expand...

To my ears, no. They are very nearly the same speaker with some small changes.

Cheers,
James
 
One thing about the K-100 that is an improvement over the Q-510 is that the connection spring clips do accept a bit larger diameter of wire. Other than that a different woofer and crossover points. Sound is the same.
 
Howdy, if you still have those grills I’d be thrilled to shoot you $10 + shipping for them. I had a pair of 510s shipped to me the grills took most of the runt of some careless packing.
Thx!

Beeble6319 said:
The Karat 100 cabs of mine were toast, but all the drivers were all in near perfect condition, and although they sounded great, the caps had to be around thirty plus years old. I picked them up locally for $40.00 BTW....
I had two nice old CS-99 Pioneer cabs that had all kinds of ugly "near AM radio quality sound" eeking out of them, so I decided to yank the fifty year old junk out and repurpose the cabinets.
View attachment 1723004 View attachment 1723005
The crossovers looked like they would have cost a lot to recap in what looked like nearly a dozen caps in each speaker. I doubt the juice would be worth the squeeze, even with new caps. I don't need PA type Kabuki loud rock speakers. Lol
View attachment 1723007
.....so, anyway....
I utilized the larger hefty Pioneer cabs in combination with some vintage Polk 10" passive radiators, (one in each cabinet); tuned to 32hz. (so the Polk specs read).
The Karat 100 woofers are about seven inches in diameter, so it should hopefully help out the bass.
I'm also installing some bracing in a couple places between the woofer and radiator, then sealing it all up airtight when the inside business is finished.

I should be able to utilize,(IMO) the uglyass grills, by reversing them and covering them with acoustically transparent grill fabric. The grills are near perfect, so it would be a shame.
I may "86" the "grandmas house" style lattice and brace it with small dowels somehow, but that's down the road a bit.
Sorry if I made any Pioneer fans cringe.....:D
*
Ps;
I kept the two excellent condition brown metal grills for the Karat 100 model cabs, if someone wants them.
All I want is the actual cost of shipping + a ten dollar time & effort fee.
I hate to see them go in the trash......lol
Click to expand...
 
Beaux Beaux said:
Howdy, if you still have those grills I’d be thrilled to shoot you $10 + shipping for them. I had a pair of 510s shipped to me the grills took most of the runt of some careless packing.
Thx!
Click to expand...

Beeble6319 hasn't been around since April, might be a while before he answers.

I am at work now so this will have to wait until I get home, but:
I have for sure a pair of white grills, I might have 1 or more black grills and I'm pretty sure that I do not have any brown grills. I'll look this evening and post a private message to you.

I'm not in charge here, so please don't take this as me trying to be the boss, but generally the rules are that buying and selling needs to be limited to the Barter Town sub-forum or private messaging. Just trying to save you some grief. :)

Cheers,
James
 
Lovely! I've been a Canton fan from my college years when the Ergo series was new. This summer, in lockdown boredom, I bought a pair of Karat 300's I didn't need and recapped them with spare Russian caps in my parts bin. The dome tweeters and midranges all had a thick covering of cat (?) hair stuck to the gel coating that nearly made me throw up in my mouth. I knew I shouldn't.... but I had to wipe them down with some mineral spirits to remove most of the hair. Of course, some of the gel came off as well. I'm a little concerned about the effect of the coating removal - but I couldn't live with the cat hair!
 
There's a gentleman in Arizona named Richard So who refreshes old ADS drivers and re-does the coatings with I believe different but similar stuff. If you care, you might ask him for advice or if he'd "re-dope" yours.

Obankenobi said:
Lovely! I've been a Canton fan from my college years when the Ergo series was new. This summer, in lockdown boredom, I bought a pair of Karat 300's I didn't need and recapped them with spare Russian caps in my parts bin. The dome tweeters and midranges all had a thick covering of cat (?) hair stuck to the gel coating that nearly made me throw up in my mouth. I knew I shouldn't.... but I had to wipe them down with some mineral spirits to remove most of the hair. Of course, some of the gel came off as well. I'm a little concerned about the effect of the coating removal - but I couldn't live with the cat hair!
Click to expand...
 
lippertini said:
There's a gentleman in Arizona named Richard So who refreshes old ADS drivers and re-does the coatings with I believe different but similar stuff. If you care, you might ask him for advice or if he'd "re-dope" yours.
Click to expand...
Thanks much! I will ask about the dome gel
 
Always worth reviving a Canton thread. I picked up a pair of 4 ohm Karat 300's a couple of months ago and they are now the speakers in my main system. Were recapped by the previous owner. They moved my Time Window 1A's to the second system status. The 1A's are in a small bedroom. Never thought of them as near field speakers but running them with my ST-70 the TW's sound fantastic near field.

The 300's are really well done speakers with bass, mids and highs blended well. Very good sound stage, separation, clarity. They've got it all. They remind me of my Altec Bolero C's but with better highs and voice reproduction.

Blowing a speaker is a real concern. Speakers are listed as 100 watts max which my Outlaw was 110 at 8 ohms and 165 at 4. Now using a Parasound 2250 v.2 thats 400 per at 4 ohms that can drive them to stupid loud levels. Seems like speaker abuse to use 40+ year old speakers like that but they sound so damn good.

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Joining the Karat 100 club.

I just picked up a pair for an OK price. I little rough and had been painted black but all the drivers work so I took a swing. I just love the sticky dome tweeter from this era (Heco, Braun, Visonik, ADS, Et al.). And add in a sticky dome Mid and it's magic time.

Turns out these ones were originally is some sort of Longleaf or Sugar Pine veneer. Seems like an odd choice for a German company?

Anyway, I stripped off the black paint and repaired the only major chip in the veneer as best I could match, then re-oiled them. Not looking to shabby even if Pine is not my favorite look (you'll see they would fit well in someone's rustic cabin). While I was at it I fitted better connections and re-did the crossover out of my spares bin. The results were very rewarding sonically. Currently in my living room.

I took some pics along the way.

Here they are testing out on the bench. It's hard to see in the pics but the metal grills are a dark bronze color, not black.
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Here's what was under the black paint. I can tell they probably weren't painted black from the factory because there was a layer of Lacquer under the paint that I also had to strip off. The chunk out of the veneer was also painted black. And, everywhere the layer of Lacquer was broken the black paint had bled into the fibers of the wood and stained it indicating the paint went of wet after the scratches in the lacquer were created.
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Here's the only major inclusion into the veneer and the repair I made.
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Here's the 1st coat of Oil.
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And here's the binding posts I installed (salvaged from some long forgotten pair of speakers that got parted out)
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Here's pics of the crossovers and in final situ.

This pair are the 8 ohm versions and the boards are labelled "Karat 100/1". Date stamp inside the cabinet is 1985.

At this point I should probably talk about sound. When I first hooked them up they sounded decent, but I definitely thought to myself "ah there's that vintage German sound". Analytical, a little bright (ok, actually pretty bright), kinda sucked out mids. But I knew it was all electrolytics even on the tweeter, so thought I would give them a little love and see where they went. I dug around in my parts bin and found some parts to at least get some nice film caps on the mid and tweet and I had a pair of used 33uf bi-polars that tested good and matched. I also had some Dayton premium resistors that I figured may or may not make a difference.
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Well, after I pulled the parts and measured I quickly found out why they didn't quite sound right. And it wasn't what I thought of as the German house sound of the 80's.

On the Woofer circuit:
33uf caps measured 48 and 50uf. Both caps measured high ESR, but one was off the charts at about 40ohms!
The 2.2 ohm resistors, one measured 3.1 ohms and the other 6.1 ohms. Replaced with 2.4 ohm 10 watt 1% tolerance.

On the Midrange circuit:
10uf caps measured 12.5 and 13.5uf, ESR was high at around 3 ohms on both.
For the 33 ohm resistors I didn't have anything to match but did pull and measure and they were still within spec.

On the Tweeter circuit:
3.3uf caps measured 3.9 and 4.1 with OK ESR.
The 0.47 resistors measured around 0.58. Replaced with 0.51 1%.

As you can guess the above measurements I believe would certainly throw the crossover points way out of whack. No wonder I was hearing a disconnect in the driver integration that had a suck out and sounded bright?

After the crossover upgrade they actually sound very, very nice. Great imaging and coherence. Still just slightly brighter than I like, but my ears have adjusted very quickly and it's by no means objectionable.

Oh, and I also took the opportunity to mirror the drivers since the mid and tweeter cut outs are exactly the same.

I traced out the crossover. I can't guarantee 100% accuracy, but it seems pretty straight forward.

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Here's before and after the rebuild. I also replaced all the internal wiring.
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And here they are in situ. I once read a treatise about whether to run the tweeters inboard, or outboard. I wish I could find it again. The author argued that, even though it's counter-intuitive, if you run the speakers close together (like 6' or less) the tweeters should be inboard. IIRC the reasoning had to do with less surface diffraction on the inner edges and comb filtering? Or something to that extent. I tried it and I've come to the conclusion that it works for me in my space better than outboard.

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