Houston,
We Have A Problem…Within seconds of
crankin’ the S-2000’s up, I was aware all was not well with the flat panels. Who
stole the bass? For that matter who stole the highs? The bass was an easy (well,
sort of) fix. What was so interesting was that there is absolutely no polarity
marking on the satellite wires. No way for the assemblers to tell which is the
positive lead and which is the negative lead. So I guess that they don’t. Hey,
they’ll be right at least 50% of the time. The plug ends are RCA type plugs that
fit into RCA type jacks, so you can’t merely flip the wires around—too bad, my
life would have been made easier. But then, I couldn’t have whipped out my soldering
gun. I wanted to see how the technology worked anyway and switching the input
wires around gave me a great excuse to pop open the flat panels themselves.
What
you see is a cloth covering two plastic panels sandwiched together via corrugation.
A mechanical magnetic element sits at the rear center of the speaker and you’ll
notice the two copper leads protruding from the bottom (look left). It’s the input
wires that are soldered to the copper leads that are the culprit. As I mentioned
earlier, with no markings on the wire, there is no way to tell which orientation
is correct.
Even
though this shot is on the dark side, you can still see the plastic corrugation
that keeps the front and rear panels apart.
Very
carefully, I had to cut through the goop holding the incorrectly assembled mess
together. After re-striping the wires and cleaning up, I was ready to hear my
handiwork.
Before And After
 | |  |
Before | | After |
I
snapped the left speaker back together and viola’—in phase speakers! The bass
was back but the highs were still a problem. You can tell severe high frequency
roll-off when you crank the volume all the way up and you still don’t hear any
hiss.
