Howdy,
Howdy, folks. I received a set of Dahlquist W-2 and CA-1 cabinets as partial payment for helping a family friend move from Tucson to Sante Fe. I have them hooked up to an 80W Harman-Kardon HK3390. The stereo has recently been serviced at The Hi-Fi shop here in Tucson, and it's been working great driving some Ohm CAM-16s that I picked up off Craigslist for $75 several years ago. I'm running into issues with the tweeter on the CA-1 cabinet that happens to be on the left channel.
The W-2 cabinets have two 10" woofers. The CA-1 cabinets have one 1" tweeter in an elipsoid bezel that's ~5 1/4" wide and ~4" tall and one 6" mid-range driver. The W-2 cabinets have two inputs on each cabinet, one feeding the woofers in the cabinet, and one which routes through a crossover to the CA-1 cabinet. There's some old For Sale listings floating around the web, and a couple posts here and there about these cabs in particular, but not much usable information for my troubleshooting so I'm throwing this thread up in hopes someone may have some insight to share.
The amp has two speaker outputs so I have one set routed to the W-2 cabinet inputs, and the other set routed to CA-1 input. The CA-1 input signal travels up through the W-2 cabinet to the top the back panel, and is split into a two channel crossover output, one for the tweeter and one for the mid-range driver. All the wiring is 14g full copper wire with quality banana plugs except the woofer crossover on the left channel. The posts on the woofer crossover output seem to have been cracked off at some point from sideloading or cross threading on the W-2 cabinets, but there's just enough thread left to pinch some bare cable in there so I've ran bare cable on those posts to banana plugs on the CA-1 cabinet side. The tweeter posts on that cab are in fine shape, as are all the posts on the other cab set.
Okay, so that's where I'm at with everything. Now, I just need to open this CA-1 cab up so I can have a look at the tweeter. It isn't pushing any signal at all though the mid-range driver is doing fine. It just sounds like crap on that side since there's no highs to speak of.
I'm pretty sure I can get the panel the posts are mounted in off with some careful razor blade prying, but how do I go about getting access to the tweeter? There's no screws on the back of the cabinet or any access panel. Do I try to carefully pry the tweeter bezel out? When I do that, will there be a fuse I can check, or do I have to look into sourcing a replacement tweeter? Is the tweeter something I can source easily, or am I going to need to trawl eBay for the next couple years hoping that a spare one pops up? I have no idea what I'm doing.
Please help. My girlfriend is so bored watching me screw with these things. I keep saying things like "these were made in Canada, babe. they were like $1800. In 1998 dollars! it's not the original Dahlquist but this other one that bought the name. babe, please don't leave me." She thinks I'm such an idiot. She listens to true crime podcasts on her cell phone speakers and is more pleased than I was the first time I heard Casiopea's self-titled LP. I wish I was like her. But I'm not. I'm a neurotic fool who wants to listen to Baroness's Yellow and Green as God intended: in a folding chair strategically positioned between two Canadian audiophile speakers, rattling my girlfriend's ball python into a stupor. Poor thing.
Currently I've just set my Ohms on top of the W-2s and routed the Speaker 2 outputs into those and I imagine if any of y'all walked into my living room to witness such a blasphemous setup you'd be calling the police.
Thanks for reading. I love you.
Joe
