Rewiring Carver Amazings

I am considering rewiring my Amazings. I was wondering what the best wire would be to do this job.

I have used Cardas wire with good results. I used 11.5 gauge for the ribbons and woofers and 15.5 gauge for the rest. I also suggest upgrading the binding posts to Cardas gold and placing Dynamat on the woofer baskets to cut down on ringing at high volume levels. A couple words of caution, the Cardas wire takes awhile to heat, so you need to be careful not to melt the plastic around some connections and the binding post plate is very brittle. Cardas wire is available from http://www.percyaudio.com.

Further to the reply on the rewiring of the amazing speakers,I was wondering what cost would be involved in the wires. Cardis tends to be very expensive and being Canadian I will be looking at a bit more.

15.5 seems to be the only guage. It's about 1.95 a foot according to Cardis. I asked them what the ultimate rewire might be. They said pure silver from DH Labs doubled up 18 AWG silver for about 10 bucks a foot. Not sure what doubled up 18 AWG silver was all about. Think this might be overkill. I would really like to know how many feet of wire it takes to do the Amazings. This would help me in my decision of what quality wire to buy. anyone help me here?

tah800,

Percy Audio has alot of different Cardas chassis wire, they even have a 9.5 gauge now. I don't know why you say they only have the 15.5. Anyway, I used 20 feet of 11.5 and 16 feet of 15.5.

Is the original wire in the Amazings all that good. I can't see Bob Carver putting just any wire in the speakers and compromising their sound( they certainly sound great with the original wire). Will doing the rewire make a noticable difference. I would like to feel going to all this work will be worth it. By the same token if they came out worse it would be a real disaster.I have also heard from several people that good old electrical house wire would be better than what's in there. I find that hard to believe.I quess what i'm saying is it really worth it. I will have to transport these speakers about 80 miles to get this refit done. With good quality wire and labour I'm probably looking at a couple of hundred bucks. Any advice would be appreciated

Makers cut corners where they can, Carver cut corners with the wire. If I remember right, it's like 24 gauge going to the woofers. What's surprising is that they sounded as good as they did. IMHO, yes it's worth it, but it's your money.

to f1nut I have decided to go with the Cardas Hook up wire and the Cardas binding posts. The guy who is doing the work for me had an interesting question. Why would the woofers be wired with thinner wire than the ribbons. Did Bob Carver have something in mind when he did that and should you use the same idea when doing the rewire.My banana plugs don't go all the way into the binding posts. I'm wondering if I sould order the longer set of Cardas posts. Art

Art,

Yep, that is the same question I had about the small gauge woofer wire. I talked with Michael Percy about it and we came to the conclusion that the larger gauge wire was the way to go. I believe Carver used a larger gauge wire for the ribbons because of the heat factor otherwise I think those wires would have been small gauge too.

When you say your bananas won't go in all the way I'm quessing you mean on the original Carver posts as I had the same problem. You won't have any problem with the Cardas posts. The difference between the Cardas short and long posts is the length of the post on the back side, it has nothing to do with the knob side. You'll be fine with the short posts.

Something else you may want to do, I used thin (1/16") red and black pin strip tape from a hobby shop to wrap around each post knob to identify the positive and negative terminals. It gave them a nice finished look too.

Jesse

To f1nut Jesse ,I know I 'm a bit of a pain in the ass but I went back to your first response where u mentioned 11.5 wire for the woofers and tweeters and 15.5 for the rest. Is the 11.5 a stranded wire and did u have any difficulty soldering wire that thick? The guy doing the jod for me was wondering if the 15.5 might be a little bit easier to install. You also mentioned 15.5 wire for the rest. I'm not quite sure what"the rest" means.you also mentioned putting stuff on your woofer baskets. I'm not really sure I've heard a ringing sound. Could you describe that to me in a little more detail. I may try to get this stuff from Parts Connection as they have a Canadian division. I'd order from this Percy guy but there is always the possibility of duty charges at the border. I also have to multiply all American prices by 1.35. That's a real killer. I'm placing my order this week and just wanted to check out some final details. This guy who is doing the repair also has a pair of Amazings which are in bad shape. I'm going to make him an offer so I can have a second pair to play apound with. I don't want to risk experimenting to much with my own set. Art

Art,

No problem, that's why we hang out on these forums to help and learn, right?

Yes, all the Cardas wire is stranded and both gauges of the wire are hard to solder. You have to keep heat on the wire only until it's hot enough to take solder, but the 15.5 is a little easier. I used the 15.5 on the binding post, fuses and crossover connections because it was easier to heat. If your guy wants to use 15.5 all around it will still be a major step up.

The ringing from the baskets isn't something obvious, but it's there. If you ping a basket with your fingernail you will hear the thin ringing noise. After appling the Dynamat it will just go thunk. I applied it to the "arm" part of the basket frame and that did the trick.

Jesse