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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: That was a while ago... posted by genungo on June 28, 2015 at 13:34:10:
In late spring 1987, I bought the lil' Bose 101s. They sucked. But they did pique my interest in small speakers. Sometime during my junior year of high school (87-88), I bought the AR Powered Partners. Who knows? Maybe they were ordered from J&R Music World.The intent was to use them with my Sony D-10 Discman. The Powered Partners were triangular in shape. Since they used a lot of metal, they were heavy. Since I placed them on or near the floor, they rested on a rectangular side, which meant they then fired diagonally upward.
During my sophomore year (90-91) at UCSC, I had the Powered Partners in my dorm room. The wooden shelves were on the wall, above the desk and bedframe. Thus, angling the Powered Partners upward, where the sound would fire to the ceiling, was not an option. I had to place the Powered Partners horizontally on their triangular sides. In this layout, their front face, which was where the mass of the drivers lay, stuck out about an inch off of the wooden shelves. To prevent rattling, I placed Sorbothane cutouts between the shelves and the speakers.
Remember, I was a penniless college student. So I had to get creative, when stringing a strap across the top front strip of the speakers. I nailed various materials to the plastered walls, strung and fastened (usually with tape) them across the speakers' fronts. My friend/neighbor Amanda shrugged her shoulders, "Why don't you just take my old bras, and string 'em across?"
Nah, the bras were too elastic.
I had a friend, Roger, who worked (doing what, I know not) at the campus radio station, KZSC. He would frequently bring over excess CDs the radio station did not want. One lazy weekend afternoon, he came over, and I clearly recall him playing "Your Mama Don't Dance," first the Loggins & Messina version, then Poison's cover. After the Poison version came to an end, Roger looked at me and remarked, "Other than using electric guitars, they didn't change much."
For their Friday and Saturday night parties, my dorm neighbors occasionally borrowed the Powered Partners, which weren't as big as regular box speakers. Moreover, the Powered Partners could play loudly with ease. They used an RCA input, so if you used a Discman or Walkman, you needed a minijack-to-RCA adapter cable. I had some entry-level AudioQuest 1-meter cable.
That was a year of drought. Weekends were often sunny and warm. Some other groundfloor residents borrowed my Powered Partners. They placed the speakers on a dresser, faced them out into the quad. Since they were wannabe hippies, they played their "alternative" music. I still recall when someone turned up some Janes Addiction, and Heather, who was sunbathing in the quad, told him to "Turn that noise down!"
Okay, to answer your question. After I reviewed the Totem Element Fire, I decided to buy it from the guy who lent it to me. A keeper, the Fire then needed a stand. After playing with several stands, I got a better feel for what the correct height, in my room, should be. To match the pretty gloss white finish, I then shopped around. Sound Anchors refused to make a stand in a color other than black. But Billy Bags, who were in the midst of a move, said they could make their 3-post stand in gloss white. Bingo!
I use Blu-Tak between the stands' top plate and the speakers. Interestingly, when I placed the blobs of Blu-Tak halfway along the edges of the stands' top plate, the sound of the Fire became rolled-off up top. Placing the Blu-Tak blobs in the stands' top plate's corners allowed the Fire to become the self-effacing transducer it is.
Other than deep bass, the Fire honestly tells me exactly what is going on upstream. So when I make, for example, a cable change, the Fire lets us know. The Fire effortlessly tells us the differences between the after-market fuses [see my posts over on Tweakers' Asylum] I've placed into the upstream electronics.
Edits: 06/28/15
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