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On Topic... dumb audio-related mistakes
I have a xo prototype board and even have the sections labeled T, M, and W
Changed some components and turned on the music but the left speaker was a LOT lower in volume. Went over and checked all the conntections, evertying seemed fine. Except, I hooked up the woofer to the T-section and the tweeter to the W-section. Nothing like sending everything BELOW 300Hz to the tweeter!! Luckily the volume was quite low and no damage done.
Comments
You are the first person to ever do that
Over time, you will stop making the mistakes. Maybe. I screwed up a few months ago and paralleled when it should have been seriesed and put the amp in to protect. This was during alligator clip phase. Been awhile since I had a mistake like that at solder level, though.
Another mistake I made was getting frustrated that I could not get a good measurement. Sat in front of my measurement PC and fiddle-fucked with every setting I could find in ARTA and just could not get a good measurement above 600-800 Hz. I finally realized I had the mic pointed at the floor.
This can be a great, informative thread.
...the measurement mistake was yesterday, by the way.
I set up a speaker for measurement that was designed with a grill, but I removed it in order to get the mic aligned properly. The response had become ragged compared to the day before, so I sat there for several minutes scratching my head trying to figure it out which by the way may, or may not be partially responsible for my lack of hair.... I was a dumbass and forgot to put the grill back on.
Ahh, the old drooping mic clip?
I think there's a pill for that.
Is it blue?
I dropped a cabinet with an expensive and irreplaceable driver in it. Fell from 3.5ft onto carpeted floor. The driver has a heavy motor and very thin and weak frame, so it tore itself apart. The cabinet had a lot of work into it with expensive and very hard to work with raw walnut burl veneer. Damage to the cabinet was relatively small in comparison, in the back corner so was salvageable.
Speaker was completed with a different irreplaceable driver so all was not lost.
RIP Motus
Other Motus driver sits on the shelf looking pretty. Maybe one day I’ll build a little pedestal for it to keep it as a display piece since a single 5” driver isn’t of much use to me otherwise.
Careful, that is how you get splinters.
InDIYana Event Website
One time I forgot to install a protection cap when measuring my Viawave ribbon tweeter. I think only 2 sine sweeps made it through before I was able to hit the CD pause button. Luckily no damage. I did FR and distortion measurements and compared it to the other tweeter and they looked the same. Whew!
Used the inside cabinet measurement for the outside board length. I wondered why the proportions looked off after glue up
Too many to list, each one a learning experience (and a couple I apparently had to 'try' more than once).
Most recently, trimming down my port just a tad too much- fortunately a thin-walled tube (via PE) fits snuggly over as an extension.
When I was building lots of tube gear, I had a power amp "breadboarded" on a table - a sprawl of parts and wires. I was using my trusty NAD 3020 integrated amp as a preamp. Since the table was pretty crowded, it was sitting up on it's side. When I got up grab some other parts, I snagged the long RCA cable and the NAD hit the floor. A piece of the plastic faceplate went flying. I was heartbroken. That amp was my first new hifi purchase back in the early 80s. Surprisingly, it still worked.
I have been looking for a faceplate off and on for the past 2 years. Prices always seemed unreasonably high. I stumbled across a really nice specimen on eBay for a good price last weekend. Seller said it had a buzz issue when powering up and it was missing the feet. I gave it the initial bench test on Wednesday - just needs recapped!
Man, I had forgotten how amazing these amps sound!
If always been a fan of NAD products, very nice sound, well built and classy understated looks. They’re quite expensive these days though, but I guess everything is.
I once built a pair of speaker enclosures in a hurry to take to a friends for a listening session. One box ended up 1" taller than the other. That whole inside/outside thing again... Worse yet, I measured from each end when cutting the driver holes and the spacing is off by an inch also.
More recently, I had a very nice pair of unfinished boxes that were gifted to me. I was planning to cut a hole for an 8" woofer. Apparently, I made a math error when calculating the radius. You can probably see where this is going... When I went to install the 8" woofer, it fell through the hole. Now they have 12" woofers.
Knowing that the Universe doesn't have an Infinite Capacity SIM Card I no longer take pictures of my mistakes.
This thread seems like a list of all the things that I manage to accomplish on every project..
The Mistake Club. You know the first rule about mistake club?
https://www.jfcomponents.com/
We beat the shit out of whoever made the mistake? I think I saw that movie.
While taking measurements of a speaker in my living room, a wiring mess everywhere, the usual.
I wasn't paying attention to Stanley, one of my cats. Who decided to start playing with the cables and shorted out my amp. Blew the output section. Luckily I had spare transistors. I wired everything differently after that.
When I was routing the round overs on one of the corners of the Cherry Pi's I managed to tear a chunk out of the solid cherry edge trim. I ended up squaring up the damaged wood with a router and gluing in a small patch and routing the round over again.
-Measuring to the edge of the pin on the circle cutting jig instead of the center.
-Finding out my integrated amp that I use for both listening and measuring merges the bass output to both channels.. One time I forgot to unplug the other channel speaker while measuring. Imagine my flabbergast at the bass output of a CD/horn with the highpass wired up! I'm sure I've forgotten to unplug it before but never noticed the behavior until now.
-Cutting down the outer sides of a tower enclosure to the inside dimension length. Fortunately it didn't lose enough % volume to make a huge difference in the bass department. I bumped them back up to anticipated height with a simple and short base/pedestal made of 1x2 material.. In the end, the base brings out a very sophisticated look to the project compared to the standard lump sitting directly on the floor IMO.
I was building a pair of small floor standers with more than enough bracing. There were no holes cut in the baffles and backs before glue-up. I realized I forgot to mark which end was the top or bottom on the second one. The mdf had no noticeable flaws that would give me a clue. Knuckle wrap - hard to tell anything. Stud finder didn't help either. I ended up having to drill a small hole in the back and poke around with a piece of coat hanger to find where the closest brace was located.
^^^ I almost did that with my latest bass bins
At a DIY event in Kentucky. playing random tracks. Queued up one Ben and I had listened to prior. I forgot that this disc was at least 6db hot compared to what we had been using. Loud would be one way to describe it. Ever see a tweeter hit excursion?? Yeah, this was my Armonicos series crossover build. The woofer pumped enough that it looked like it pooped itself when some of the fill exited the down firing port! I thought for sure the tweeters were toast (SB26STAC BTW). The HP section was 3rd order electrical. Give credit to SB, the tweets were fine and are still in use today some 8 or 9 years later.
Here is another one from a dearly departed friend, Jeff Bagby. At a Meniscus event a few years ago, maybe the year before he passed, Jeff displayed a new speaker. Memory is fuzzy exactly which one, but I believe it used a set of NLA Focal drivers. Well, the top end was HOT! Way hot. Jeff had only had the cabinets for a day before the event so voicing time was pretty non existent. When he got home, he realized that the treble control on his Carver integrated amp was way down. Doh!
Potentially proffering a unique advantage of a first order crossover network...
So now re-evaluating the first order parallel (I've built) vs in a series network, just for fun.