I have a couple pair of vintage AR speakers that I don’t have room for any more and want to sell. The 2ax’s needed the level controls cleaned, so I set out to do that. You pull out the woofer and then you can get at them. They come apart easily. Putting them back together is a little trickier because you have to get the wire clamp back into a hole on the side. To aid the process I set a small mirror inside. Both get reassembled, woofer back in and on to the second unit. Ready to reassemble the pot, and go for the mirror. No where to be found.You probably saw this coming, but where else could it have gone but inside the first speaker. Yup. Good thing it wasn’t the second speaker, or it would have stayed there!
We have two pairs of speakers on the patio. They are wired via those wall mount volume controls back to a multi-zone avr.
One of the volume controls was getting flaky, so I was going to replace it. I decided to replace the other one while I was at it because they were 15 years old.
I meticulously documented the wiring and hookups. The first replacement, the flaky one, went fine.
Second one, no sound. I rechecked the wiring and hookups. Redid the connections. No sound. Got a ladder and checked the speaker wire hookups. Disconnected and reconnected just to be sure. Checked wiring on the volume control again. No sound.
Climbed back up on the ladder and unhooked one of the speakers and removed it from the mount and brought it down. (It’s 90 degrees plus on the patio and I’m getting hot under the collar. So is the Mrs.) Dug an old receiver out of the closet and hooked the speaker to it. Sound!
So I sat and thought about how everything was wired and where the failure could be. If one was working they both should be.
Then it occurred to me there was a Niles multi-speaker selector box back at the avr. Went inside to take a look at the wiring there and everything is a-ok.
But wait. There’s a ‘patio’ switch and a ‘deck’ switch. The patio (working speaker pair) switch was on. The ‘deck’ switch was off. Turned it on. Sound!
The Mrs. (having suffered through a couple of hours helping me in the 90+ degree heat) was not amused.
Then I recalled that I had turned it off because birds had built a nest on top of the non-working speaker and I had switched it off so as to not inadvertently disturb the babies. Also didn’t want to risk them messing with the wires and shorting out my amp. Wish I had remembered doing that.
