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I have a personal shopper ;)
dcibel recently snagged some Optimus speakers for me from a local Facebook Marketplace. I retrieved them yesterday from him (plus listened to a few new Sheepdog tunes). These babies are cherry (...I mean walnut), the veneer is flawless. No corner chips or scratches anywhere. I've finished new projects with more veneer issues than these have. Even the cloth is nearly like new. They must've been sitting in the OEM boxes most of their life. They appear to have been recently oiled with a slight rust hue giving an almost mahogany tone but still beautiful.
I will likely sell the drivers and re-purpose (gasp) the boxes for a new project. Reid suggested an 8" 2-way since I have more than ample Rival 8's on hand but this is a few projects in the future so I'll have time to ponder.
David
and 1 other.
Comments
How do I un-announce?
It's a great speaker, I rebuilt a pair some years back that was in rough shape. Veneer was dull and dry with a couple water marks, woofer foam surround was toast. Sanded and oiled the veneer, and redesigned using the original (Seas!) tweeter and Silver Flute 8" woofer and they looked like new again and sounded pretty dang good for what it was. The cabinet is about 35L IIRC, slot ported in the back.
It's too bad that the owner "refurbished" the woofer foam surround with rubber. It ruined the T/S parameters making the driver extremely boomy in the stock cabinet. The Seas tweeter is surprisingly decent for it's age, perfectly listenable.
Found a photo of the T-70 I worked on. Finished with Tung oil, and the Silver Flute was just undersized for the stock woofer hole, good enough with the covers on
It's funny that you say that, I was thinking this morning of modeling to see if I could use my silverflute up in this box
Your example even fit the hole surprisingly well.
I don't recall the cabinet tuning, but I do recall the Silver Flute worked well enough without making any modification to the slot port.
Some comments from the designer:
Optimus T-70s
I was the design manager for Tandy Speakers. The T-70s were my conception. I wanted to design a slot loaded system (ala Toby's speaker designs). The T-70 was one of my favorite speakers we designed. The tweeter was a Seas that we made a special purchase. Generally we wouldn't be able to afford a Seas in our price range.
The Woofer was designed by my team and built in our speaker plan in Fort Worth. Unfortunately, we had to use foam surrounds due to cost and efficiency. Part Express has repair kits to repair foam surrounds. I repaired several and it fairly simple and straight forward.
It's a shame they painted them black. They had a nice oiled walnut veneer.
If you have any more questions, email me.
Regards,
Chris Kline
KLine Labs
The cabinet is a slot tuned Helmholtz. Even a 1/4 wavelength would be 6 3/4 feet for the frequency (42 Hz) that it is tuned to. This was an example of an over zealous marketing guy.
Chris Kline
KLine Labs
Dude, that's a fucking great score! What a find🤘🏼
I really should start calling my slot ported designs “tuned labyrinth enclosures”.