Musiciseverything
pfm Member
Hello all.
I wanted to share this discovery with the many who like me, had no idea. Last week A notification came in on my phone that I’d won an item on eBay. I hadn’t bid on anything so was confused. The incident must have happened while my phone was in my pocket, but what a fortunate incident this ended up being. Unsurprisingly, no one had bid on these old HMV branded speakers, I certainly wouldn’t have intentionally, so I won them for a tenner! Instead of contacting eBay to explain the unintended bid and get out of buying them, for the price, it seemed worth just taking them and seeing what they were like, especially since a quick google search led me to discover that they were actually made by goodmans for a compete vynil/radio system that HMV were selling.
My new HMV model 2406 arrived yesterday when I was out, my flatmate thankfully receiving them, so they were there to greet me coming home in the evening. After dinner, I set about cutting off the purpose made connectors for the original system off the ends of the extremely thin speaker wires, fitted banana plugs, and connected it up to an A&R Cambridge A60.
Immediate sound was pretty muddy, clarifying my lack of expectation, but very quickly, as they were reawakened after likely decades of being dormant, the sound started to declutter, and what a wonderful huge and involving soundstage started to emerge. I continued listening to them until the wee small hours, the sound wrapped all round me, with very seductive transparency in the upper mids, low treble, with things like reverb tails being much more apparent than I’ve heard on any of my current speaker collection. And so smooth too. These would appear to be keepers!
Okay, they are not tonally accurate, with fairly recessed mids, and although they have ten inch drivers, the bass is a little light and not particularly extended, although, not completely lacking. It’s there, in a ghostly way that, surprisingly for a bass player, I don’t mind, because these speakers do so much else so well.
I opened them up to have a look at the crossover and get cap values to get replacements ordered up since if they are original, they will be far out of original spec. The crossover is merely an inductor and an 8uf capacitor!! I’ve got a couple of Ansar super sounds on order as I’m dying to know if the roll off in the very upper frequencies could be due to the old faulty caps. I’m suspecting that this could just be that the tweeters are very old fashioned cone types so aren’t all that extended. What they do do is lovely though, very open and transparent.
The drivers themselves look to be very high quality with cast baskets and the tweeter is completely sealed at the back to stop the main driver interfering with it.
As you can tell, I’m enjoying these a lot. They’re so much fun to listen to, regardless of their limitations. I’m thinking that I’ll replace the internal extremely thing wire with some decent stuff, and put terminals on the back, so that I can run decent cable from the amp to them. This might help with the lower frequencies a bit.
As for the high frequency extension, if the Ansar capacitors, chosen because of their bright sound, don’t improve the upper extension at all, I’m wondering if it might be possible to add good more modern dome tweeters to these, with a very high crossover point from the original tweeters. I think I should perhaps put that to the DIY forum, but if anyone that reads this has any informed opinions and advice I’d be interested to hear them.
Basically, if we’re possible to sort the upper extension out and couple these with the right sub, the result would probably keep me entertained for years.
I wanted to share this discovery with the many who like me, had no idea. Last week A notification came in on my phone that I’d won an item on eBay. I hadn’t bid on anything so was confused. The incident must have happened while my phone was in my pocket, but what a fortunate incident this ended up being. Unsurprisingly, no one had bid on these old HMV branded speakers, I certainly wouldn’t have intentionally, so I won them for a tenner! Instead of contacting eBay to explain the unintended bid and get out of buying them, for the price, it seemed worth just taking them and seeing what they were like, especially since a quick google search led me to discover that they were actually made by goodmans for a compete vynil/radio system that HMV were selling.
My new HMV model 2406 arrived yesterday when I was out, my flatmate thankfully receiving them, so they were there to greet me coming home in the evening. After dinner, I set about cutting off the purpose made connectors for the original system off the ends of the extremely thin speaker wires, fitted banana plugs, and connected it up to an A&R Cambridge A60.
Immediate sound was pretty muddy, clarifying my lack of expectation, but very quickly, as they were reawakened after likely decades of being dormant, the sound started to declutter, and what a wonderful huge and involving soundstage started to emerge. I continued listening to them until the wee small hours, the sound wrapped all round me, with very seductive transparency in the upper mids, low treble, with things like reverb tails being much more apparent than I’ve heard on any of my current speaker collection. And so smooth too. These would appear to be keepers!
Okay, they are not tonally accurate, with fairly recessed mids, and although they have ten inch drivers, the bass is a little light and not particularly extended, although, not completely lacking. It’s there, in a ghostly way that, surprisingly for a bass player, I don’t mind, because these speakers do so much else so well.
I opened them up to have a look at the crossover and get cap values to get replacements ordered up since if they are original, they will be far out of original spec. The crossover is merely an inductor and an 8uf capacitor!! I’ve got a couple of Ansar super sounds on order as I’m dying to know if the roll off in the very upper frequencies could be due to the old faulty caps. I’m suspecting that this could just be that the tweeters are very old fashioned cone types so aren’t all that extended. What they do do is lovely though, very open and transparent.
The drivers themselves look to be very high quality with cast baskets and the tweeter is completely sealed at the back to stop the main driver interfering with it.
As you can tell, I’m enjoying these a lot. They’re so much fun to listen to, regardless of their limitations. I’m thinking that I’ll replace the internal extremely thing wire with some decent stuff, and put terminals on the back, so that I can run decent cable from the amp to them. This might help with the lower frequencies a bit.
As for the high frequency extension, if the Ansar capacitors, chosen because of their bright sound, don’t improve the upper extension at all, I’m wondering if it might be possible to add good more modern dome tweeters to these, with a very high crossover point from the original tweeters. I think I should perhaps put that to the DIY forum, but if anyone that reads this has any informed opinions and advice I’d be interested to hear them.
Basically, if we’re possible to sort the upper extension out and couple these with the right sub, the result would probably keep me entertained for years.
