My apartment setup

[Brandon Hartwick]

How will you stop your cat from doing it again? Can you keep him out of that room?

I'll put the mesh grills back on and that'll stop them from getting into it. Paper cone woofer basically sitting on the floor was a recipe for disaster.

It's not a total loss, but it's rather annoying. I'll keep looking and see if upgrades are viable, I'd still like to get better bass.

 

[Robert D]

The woofers on my Prodigy speakers are made of aluminum I think. FInd something like that. The cat will end up shreding the grill now, but thats better than the woofer.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

I did some browsing around Solen last night and Dayton Reference woofers seem like a pretty good fit. I'm picking up a Crown XLS1002 with DSP to run the woofers in an active configuration. I'm going to try the stock woofers first and see how it all shakes out, the removable back panel on the cabinet will allow me to try ported configurations without hacking up the enclosure if I want to.

 

[Brad225]

I'll put the mesh grills back on and that'll stop them from getting into it. Paper cone woofer basically sitting on the floor was a recipe for disaster.

It's not a total loss, but it's rather annoying. I'll keep looking and see if upgrades are viable, I'd still like to get better bass.
View attachment 22784
View attachment 22785

That is amazing that they only scratched on the dust cap. That should have no affect on the speaker performance.
As far as the appearance, take the speaker to someone that repairs speakers and they can install a new dust cap.

 

[twodogs112]

I purchased a crown xli 1500 just to take a chance. I’m really glad I did. No problem driving my clarity’s and Kef 105/2. Plenty of power and doesn’t even get the slightest bit warm. Considering an xli 800 to run my ml cinema( bridged ) . I know what a lot of audiophile folks say about class d. It really works for me. Check my posts and you can get a glimpse of the equipment I have. Thanks.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

I'm going to see about just repairing the dust cap. I was going to look at getting some higher quality woofer and run them active with DSP, but the amp I was looking at sold and other options are too expensive.

I think I will purchase a new carbon steel frying pan instead lol, the other amplifier alternatives were $600+ in the used market. For now they will have to stay passive.

 

[twodogs112]

Oops I was misinformed the crown amp I spoke of is class ab. No mater it sounds great. I had a cat that liked to climb on my ml panels. Once was cute after that I had to beep him in the bedroom when I was away. Know what you’re going thru.
Got 2 dogs, bird, 2 salt water aquariums , and an outside cat. Crazy here!!!

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

Oops I was misinformed the crown amp I spoke of is class ab. No mater it sounds great. I had a cat that liked to climb on my ml panels. Once was cute after that I had to beep him in the bedroom when I was away. Know what you’re going thru.
Got 2 dogs, bird, 2 salt water aquariums , and an outside cat. Crazy here!!!

Crown has always made great amps, even the older stuff was great and had boat loads of power.

I still have the old style XLS602 before they went to class D. It ran a 21" ported subwoofer for home theater duty for years, it's collecting dust currently.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

I brought the speakers to my shop today to hopefully fix the woofer cabinets for good. All the mounting holes were in really bad shape and have been preventing the woofer from getting a proper seal. I have also drilled a set of holes just above the large inductor on the back plate, these will be for a 3rd set of binding posts to run the woofer in an active configuration since I managed to secure another amplifier.

I masked off the faces and have been brushing on diluted wood glue throughout the day to add some strength to the wood. I've also flattened and filled all the old holes.

 

[Tosh]

About 10 years ago when I had SL3, I dreamed about how to stiffen up the cabinets with external bracing and even adding volume with a bump-out on the rear....

 

[Robert D]

About 10 years ago when I had SL3, I dreamed about how to stiffen up the cabinets with external bracing and even adding volume with a bump-out on the rear....

Thats kinda how the Prodigy cabinet is built.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

About 10 years ago when I had SL3, I dreamed about how to stiffen up the cabinets with external bracing and even adding volume with a bump-out on the rear....

All this would be pretty simple to do, but I feel a 1.25 cubic foot enclosure for a single 8" woofer is a good amount of air space. I would like to try playing with ported enclosures at some point but that's a lot of work.

 

[Tosh]

Stay sealed!
Go active XO on the bass only.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

Well, I did it, I went active on the woofers with a Crown XLS 1002, a Jeff Rowland model 1 on the panels. I have the Crown electronically crossed over in bandpass mode, high pass @ 450hz & low pass @ 80hz where my sub picks up. This amp is shockingly easy to setup and it has silly amounts of power.

This honestly totally changed the way my speakers sound, these are NOT the same speaker they were a week ago. They image better and the bass just not even in the same ballpark.

Everyone with an older set of Martin Logan's should do this.

 

[Robert D]

Wow, nice work! So what all is involved in making the woofers driven by the Crown amp? It looks like the amp has a built in crossover? Thats really nice. I could see doing that on my Prodigy speakers if it isnt too involved. I dont have a bunch of experience with going too far in electronics. It looks like you had to install some binding posts? Do those wires then just lead directly to the woofers?

 

[Robert D]

Suppose too, to keep things simple, I could just use the crown amp to bi-amp my speakers. How did you figure out how much power the woofer would need?

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

Suppose too, to keep things simple, I could just use the crown amp to bi-amp my speakers. How did you figure out how much power the woofer would need?

You could just bi-amp them but you wouldn't be getting all the benefits of bypassing the internal crossover. To set the gain I actually just did it through listening and it took me all of 30 seconds to get it right where I wanted it.

This is a very easy upgrade, I'll do a little walkthrough later showing exactly how you do this and what to change.

 

[Robert D]

You could just bi-amp them but you wouldn't be getting all the benefits of bypassing the internal crossover. To set the gain I actually just did it through listening and it took me all of 30 seconds to get it right where I wanted it.

This is a very easy upgrade, I'll do a little walkthrough later showing exactly how you do this and what to change.

Thanks, that would be great. The idea of having an active crossover seems great. I guess figuring out how much power you need isn't too tough. It looks like the two woofers on each Prodigy are supposed to be around 200 watt capacity, so an amp that goes up to around 400 watts would be plenty? I think that's at 8 ohms.

 

[Brandon Hartwick]

Thanks, that would be great. The idea of having an active crossover seems great. I guess figuring out how much power you need isn't too tough. It looks like the two woofers on each Prodigy are supposed to be around 200 watt capacity, so an amp that goes up to around 400 watts would be plenty? I think that's at 8 ohms.

This amp is rated at 215W per channel into 8 ohms, it's plenty. With an active setup you're not losing any power through the passive crossover so you don't really need a ton of power. Hypex plate amps look pretty cool, but big $$$ in comparison.

 

[Tosh]

Everyone with an older set of Martin Logan's should do this.

Sing it, brother!