Ze German TEQ Varioprojector V3 speakers

I bought these speakers for cheap on Ebay - bit of a gamble as I've never heard of them before, but that dome mid looked interesting enough given the price, which was practically the cost of postage. Here's a photo of said dome. Not a Philips, which is surprising given how many European speakers used them in the 80s.

They weigh about 15lbs each and are just a bit smaller than an AR3a. The little array on top is tiltable on silicone coated rubber O-rings and spins about 250 degrees.

 

The upper cabinet has a 40mm hard dome with a massive magnet...about the size of a CD! Above that there's a 25mm polycarb dome tweeter with a more average sized magnet, but unfortunately both tweeters are blown. The wire overheated where is enters the voice coil, fusing the first few turns together.

 

Weird way of getting signal to it - the wires pass through the centre of the pole-piece. The voice coil and diaphragm assembly is glued to a tapered steel ring, which sits in the gap, centering the voice coil and presumably increasing the flux density.

The magnet/VC assembly of both HF and MF units bolt straight to the front baffle (the phase plug/shield is part of it), so they're completely custom made. No markings on either magnet though. The woofer is nothing unconventional, just a normal looking 8" driver with a rubber surround and paper cone in a sealed cabinet. It's rear-mounted but the baffle has a 60 degree bevel on the outside edge. Neat.

Crossover is interesting though - 2nd order on the woofer with a huge 30uF capacitor directly across the terminals and 3mH air-core inductor in series, which makes for a pretty low x-over point. The tweeter and midrange have 1st order filters with padding resistors. All the parts including the inductor are stamped Germany.

As they are, these sound quite nice - that dome is very crisp indeed. The lack of a low-pass filter on it probably makes up for the blown tweeter... I'm probably going to get a pair of decent Seas soft domes and drop them in, but the baffle will need to be chopped around a bit. Depending on sensitivity, the padding resistor might need to be changed too. However, I don't know their nominal impedance, so I'm going to guess that they're 8 ohms as both mid/woofer are also 8, and the crossover points line up neatly with that.

Could probably benefit from some cabinet damping too - the front baffle is made of 3/4" thick resin, but the sides are 3/4" chipboard.

Cheapo Chinese Amplifiers

For the past few years, I've been seeing very cheap - under £10, posted - amplifiers on eBay. Of course they've got outrageous power ratings given in that lovely PMPO wattage, which basically means the manufacturer can say clock radio has a 1000w amp inside...PMPO of course. Anyway, curiosity got the better of me and I bought the cheapest one I could find on there.

 

Lots of pics of the guts of this little thing after the jump.

Old flashes on new cameras

Having recently bought a battered but fixable Canon 400D for the price of an Xbox game, I repaired the memory card fault and found that the built-in popup flash wasn't working properly. It would only fire when at the very start of its throw - when fully up, it didn't want to do its thing. Since I couldn't be bothered to pull it to bits again, I decided to buy an external flash...it's more flexible anyway. Photos and electronic geekery after the jump!