[Blackmore]

naked Patrician without outer frame


Bozak Concert Grand ruined the "imaging"


Ken was working on a Patrician and I knew I needed to hear it.  Has the 18" woofer in it, not the 30, but it still could move some air in his listening room.  We fiddled with the 4 LPads to try and get some better balance, but it surely is a distinctive speaker.  The mid horn isn't attached to anything except the driver so it vibrates around a lot.  So does the tweeter on its little stand.  But hell, Ken's walls were vibrating too. 
This doesn't look like any Patrician I'd seen before in magazines, but Ken showed me the framework that surrounds this part of the speaker.  Pretty interesting design and it has provisions to add boards to the outer frame to create the final horn flare.  The crossover is housed in a wooden box and is potted.  Good luck trying to upgrade those 60 year old caps. 

Thanks Ken for a fun evening and some great burgers.  I like your Bozaks a lot better, but the Patrician did make me smile listening to that organ record.

[Vapor Audio]

Uhmmm, hmmm ... I hope beer was involved. 

[KenSeger]

Uhmmm, hmmm ... I hope beer was involved.

Beer was offered, but declined.
Granted a little bit of liquid anesthesia would probably have made the tweeter sound better. 
This speaker is the only thing I have ever seen that had a separate level control on every driver, and each control could reduce each driver's output to near zero.  That might not have been a factory offering.  Listening tests concluded that the tweeter sounded best when completely inaudible.
Ken

[Vapor Audio]

  Listening tests concluded that the tweeter sounded best when completely inaudible.

Haha, I would say I'm surprised ... but

Just tell people when you turn it off that you're enabling the directivity control 

[KenSeger]

Just tell people when you turn it off that you're enabling the directivity control 

That is one of the odd things about the Patrician, as is.  I fed it a mono signal, since there is just one, of course.  I A/B'd it with the same mono signal to one Concert Grand and one usually associates depth and imaging as a product of stereo.  But the Patrician had no image depth or space, whereas the single Concert Grand was open and spacious.
Now granted the capacitors in the Patrician are probably 50+ years old, however, when I first got my Concert Grands their caps were 30+ years old too, they sounded dull, but still had spaciousness.  Of course the mechanical I.M. coming from the midrange horn bouncing around with each woofer note can't possibly help.  Think of a Leslie with a really fast short back and forth rotation.
I'ld love to know what these would sound like with fresh caps or quad amped, but with the entire crossover potted in tar, that ain't gonna happen, unless somebody has a Pioneer D-23 handy.

If anybody else wants to hear these before they go, let me know.
Ken

[PMAT]

Old gear is so fun. Often I am surprised how basically good it is. Not all of it though. My 1st father in law was Danish and built 2way radios out of scrap in ww II for the underground movement against the nazis. After coming to to the US after the war he owned an electronics repair shop in Santa Rosa, Ca. His shop was destroyed in the 1964 earthquake so he began working out of his garage. The first time I saw his garage wall covered in drivers hanging on nails I was hooked. 1976 and he had hundreds of drivers from about 4" to about 18". We built a pair of cabinets to go in my 70 Chevy truck under the seat. I dont know what drivers we used. I bought the finest car stereo at the time and man was I the envy of all my buddies. We would play Edgar Winter Frankenstein really loud and have so much fun. Now I wonder what he had on those walls. He was the first audiophile I ever met. May he rest in peace.

[vinyldavid]

I'm glad people are getting to hear this thing.  It's actually mine-from a giant haul that I really should post about here.

I don't like the tweeter at all, but it definitely is an artifact of its time.  I would love to hear it properly put together someday (and with some serious dampening of the mid-horn).  I have no room for it at the moment, nor do I have the desire to haul it down my grandmother's basement (where I keep most of my HiFi gear), so it'll be stored in a fellow member's garage or the time being.

I thank Ken for keeping it around so long, and for bringing it back to life once more; as-found, it didn't do very much.  The fact that other GAS members get to hear this makes me happy.

[daves]

Ken and David, I will. Try to pull the d23 out of the rack this weekend to get it over to you.

[KenSeger]

Dave,
I didn't know you had a D-23, I thought what you had was a three way.  This will be interesting, not just for ditching the antiquated caps, but on some systems, getting rid of the choke coil in series with the woofer also helps.   
Dang, I'm wondering if assembling the Patrician in to its false corner exterior cabinet is worth the effort (time, weight(!), and how many wood screws?).  As you pointed out, having the drywall wall and a glass door, does not a rigid horn make.
My spare amps are fixed gain, but my main amps have gain control.
[turn on insert absurdly stupid question here mode]
Do you have a stereo amp with individual gain controls?
[turn off Coals to Newcastle mode]
Ken

[vinyldavid]

I've got a semi-battered Yamaha P2100 with individual gain controls on each channel.

[daves]

As long as you have three or four stereo amps, the d23 attenuators can match 3 watt amps with 200 watt amps.

And that shround didn't inspire tremendous confidence, ken. I would leave it naked as is.