Tweeters too loud

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OldStuff

Well-Known Member
I have a vintage pair of 3-way speakers. They have horn tweeters, a 12" midrange and a 18" base speaker. The tweeters already have a wire wound resistor rated at 25 ohms, 100 watts and it's adjustable. Right now it's set at about 1/3 of the way up. The tweeters are 8 ohm rated at 500- 20,000hz. All three speakers have a crossover. When I turn down the treble, it seems to not only turn down the volume, but cut off the higher octaves and make it sound too dark. I need a way to control the volume, or cut the tweeters back about a third of the volume, and leave my treble at 12 o'clock if that's possible. I hope that makes sense. I'm running a Mcintosh MC2200 amplifier and a Mcintosh MX-113 preamplifier. Thanks!
 
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It will help to know the brand and model of the speaker - at least the tweeter. Too many variables otherwise.
 
I seriously doubt that you have heard of them, they are Frazier speakers. Yep, 500 - 20,000hz is what is labeled on the speaker. I thought that was a lot for a tweeter myself. The crossover has a coil, capacitor and a resistor. When I bought them, I was told that they had been in a disco joint. Looks like I'll be looking for another set of tweeters. Be nice if all I had to do was put a pot. in line. Thanks!
 
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Thread is useless without some pics my good man. Frazier made quite a few different speakers. Would love to see these :)
 
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Don't laugh ... they work! ;-}

McIntosh actually shipped some of their domed tweets with pads to dampen and tone down side dispersion.

mc035cover.jpg


Anyway - maybe try it with and without a center hole to see if that kills the shrills for ya. Should be doable even with a horn, but I'd suggest adding a handle so you can get the pads out if necessary.
 
OldStuff said:
I seriously doubt that you have heard of them, they are Frazier speakers.
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There are several members here who own and have owned several Frazier speakers from the small Frazier "black box" speakers to Monte Carlo' to Dixilanders to Super Texans to the very rare Frazier-May loudspeakers which Jack Frazier's good friend, and JBL engineer Ed May partnered in the creation and production of.

We possibly haven't heard of your speakers. So, maybe you'd be kind enough to educate us about them with a couple pics and brief description. We love pics here. :)
 
Oh. Another item for the checklist ... equalization. Norah Jones and her piano could break glass here until I did a room voicing. Now she just sorta licks my ears ... mmmmmmmm ...
 
sKiZo said:
2495122_orig.jpg


Don't laugh ... they work! ;-}

McIntosh actually shipped some of their domed tweets with pads to dampen and tone down side dispersion.

mc035cover.jpg


Anyway - maybe try it with and without a center hole to see if that kills the shrills for ya. Should be doable even with a horn, but I'd suggest adding a handle so you can get the pads out if necessary.
Click to expand...
The modern alternative to stuffing a sock in it ;).
 
FWIW, i'd wager the OP's "tweeter" is probably an Atlas PA driver. Jack used lots of em in his speakers.

More than simply being turned down, it probably needs some EQ/padding in the form of a notch filter of some type.

In the real world, a smooth responding compression driver with a 500-20k range is pretty much a fantasy.
 
Regarding my McIntosh XR16's ... the tweets used were the first designed and built in-house. Also the first speakers tested in their shiny new anechoic chamber, so a bit of a learning curve involved in matching the elements for best response. Apparently, padding the domes was enough to keep the engineers happy.

PS - I did pop one way back when and tried replacing it with a similar design from Dayton Audio. Suffered severe suckage it did, and I ended up paying the big bux for an OEM replacement.

Short version - you may find that your tweets were a "mistake" and maybe the fine folk here can point you to a similar "plug 'n pray" driver that would work better for you.
 
Of course we know Frazier loudspeakers -- what do you take us for? ;)
They made some good bass bins back in the day, and some OK loudspeaker systems over the years, too.

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I suspect (although I don't know) that the level control is an L-pad (although it could be "just" a rheostat) -- either way, the description in the original post suggest to me that it may be very, very dirty, and may be cutting out the HF entirely when adjusted.
They can be difficult to impossible to clean (typically a rebuild is required) and might just be easier to replace.
Just to offer a slightly more optimistic counterpoint to @bowtie427ss's assessment -- albeit not to disagree with him outright! :)
(That I would never do -- he knows too danged much about all of this stuff)
 
Hey Guys, If I remember right Frazier had two different owners. These speakers I believe were built by the 2nd owner probably when they first started. They are 20" deep x 27.5" wide x 4' tall. They had a gold name plate that said "Marshal" on them. I took them off when I refinished them and they got misplaced when I moved. They have an option of a pop on cloth cover that I got rid of years ago because they were pretty nasty. So, what I am trying out is a piece of silky cloth over the ports between the horn and the speaker. It usually takes me the first song to get the base, and tweeter adjusted, otherwise, one will over power the other. Actually, I was pleased to see the use of the pad, it made my idea not seem too far fetched. I figured that it's pretty much the same as a cloth cover. I was glad to find that the cloth didn't muffle the tweeter, in fact so far it seems to have smoothed it out a little. Notice the little white spot on the tweeter.
 

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OldStuff said:
I seriously doubt that you have heard of them, they are Frazier speakers.
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Given any particular brand of speakers, the odds are better that at least one AK member has heard of them (or owns them!) than any other audio site. There's a reason that most google searches for any random piece of audio point right back here. Frazier has been mentioned here many times.
 
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This driver looks like a re-labelled Emilar EK175 ( definitely a decent unit > > FYI, Emilar loved to label the available frequency response on their drivers, just like that ).

Hopefully that 12" mid is working in it's own sub-enclosure . The basket outline has the look of a Fane ( maybe the Studio 12B or 12L ) .

The cute little radial horn in front of the Emilar looks to be an RCF H2009 .

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To keep all available HF coming out of that Emilar ( while the rest of the drivers signal gets attenuated ) simply wire-up a HF bypass cap ( 1uF to 6uF ) directly from the boxes + input terminal directly to the + tab of the Emilar driver.

You'll need to balance the HF to Mids ( coming through the horn ) by adjusting the Lpad to taste ( really for midrange level ) and the adding back HF by choosing the appropriate size of Bypass cap ( 1uF, to as much as 6uF ).
- You can directly add ( parallel ) caps together to get larger effective values ( FYI ).



:)
 
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I knew Frazier used Altec comp drivers but I didn’t know they used Emilar as well. That’s pretty sweet.
 
elitopus said:
I knew Frazier used Altec comp drivers but I didn’t know they used Emilar as well. That’s pretty sweet.
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The OP is correct that these would be a product of the newer Frazier company.

The Emilar drivers are from the second coming of Emilar, and those EK drivers would remain in production through the sale to Plus One Engineering. I think they used a version of the modern EK-175 as a siren driver into contemporary times.
 
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