Owners Manual For The

Marquis HD

Loudspeaker System

Table of Contents

Registration

Page

Owners Record 3

The Cabinetry / Our Commitment 4

Setup

Unpacking Your Speakers 5

Speaker Placement 6

Hooking Up Cables 7-8

Amplification 9-11

Speaker Connections 12

Fine Tuning 13

Technology

Specifications 14

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Owners Record

The serial number is located on the rear of the unit. Record this number in the space provided below. Refer to this when calling your dealer regarding this product.

Model: Marquis HD

Serial No: _________________________

Date of purchase: ___________________

Thank you for selecting a Legacy Loudspeaker System. These handcrafted instruments will provide you with many years of listening enjoyment.

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The Cabinetry / Our Commitment

Handcrafted

Beneath the surface of Marquis HD’s elegant exterior lies rigid MDF construction. Interlocking joinery maximizes the strength of the cabinet parts. Polyester fiberfill is selected for internal damping. A sharp rap on the enclosure will leave you with little more than bruised knuckles.

Each cabinet is impeccably finished on all exposed surfaces with select veneers. The exquisite finish is hand-rubbed several times to assure a patina at home with the most elegant decor.

Our Commitment

A great deal of forethought, love and satisfaction is instilled in each piece of Legacy workmanship. We take pride in getting to know many of our customers on a first name basis.

Your purchase of this product is backed by the renowned “Legacy

Satisfaction Guarantee”.

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Unpacking Your Speakers

Your new speaker system has been very carefully packaged to insure that it travels to you safely. Each speaker is protected by a doublewall outer carton with heavy V-board corner protectors. Molded foam end caps are used to protect the elegant cabinetry, and a plastic liner is provided as waterproofing. Please save this packing for future transportation. If cartons become damaged or misplaced, new ones can be purchased from Legacy Audio.

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Speaker Placement

To allow more flexibility in seating arrangements, your Legacy loudspeaker is designed for broad lateral coverage. Optimal listener position is actually about 5 to

15 degrees off of the axis normal to the loudspeaker baffle (approximately 4-5’ off the floor).

Your Legacy speaker is optimized for a flat response in the far field.

Placing the loudspeaker or the listener near a room boundary will generally increase low frequency impact. You may also wish to reduce low frequency output with your preamp's bass tone control.

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Hooking Up Cables

The ideal conductor would have negligible resistance, inductance and capacitance. The table below shows how a few actual speaker cables measure up.

Cable Ωs/ft pF/ft µH/ft

12 ga. 0.0033 24 0.21

14 ga. 0.0048 17 0.13

16 ga. 0.0079 16 0.18

18 ga. 0.0128 28 0.21

Capacitance is considered insignificant in each cable because its effect is well out of the audio bandwidth; inductance can be decreased (at the expense of increased capacitance) by keeping the conductor pair closely spaced.

How long would a cable have to be before inductance effects would impinge on the audio spectrum? Approximately 300 feet of 12 gauge would be required to establish a corner frequency of 20 kHz with an

8 Ohm loudspeaker. As you see, inductance is not a problem for most of us.

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Hooking Up Cables

What about phase shift due to frequency dependent travel times down the speaker cable? Measurements show that 100 Hz waves will be delayed about 20 billionths of a second behind 10 kHz waves when traveling to the end of a 10 foot speaker cable.

Since the cilia of the ear requires 25,000 times longer than this just to transmit phase information, phase shifting is obviously not the primary concern when considering speaker cables.

What about resistance? Finally we are getting somewhere. Resistance is the controlling factor of the amplifier/loudspeaker interface. Excessive resistance can cause major shifts of speaker crossover frequencies. The lower the impedance of the loudspeaker, the greater the effects of series resistance. A 20 foot run of 18 gauge cable can cause up to 10% deviations of crossover center frequencies. That same 20 feet can un-damp your damping factor and reduce your systems’ output by one half decibel.

In summary, there are no perfect cables. The best way to approximate the ideal would be to keep loudspeaker leads as short as is practical.

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Amplification

Ideally the loudspeaker would be among the first components selected when assembling a playback system. This would allow the user to choose an amplifier capable of delivering adequate amounts of current into the frequency dependent load presented by the loudspeaker. However, when upgrading a system, audiophiles may find themselves matching their new loudspeakers to their existing amplification. For this reason, extensive measures have been taken to ensure that each Legacy speaker system represents a smooth, non-reactive load to virtually any amplifier.

Often there is much confusion regarding amplification and loudness levels. It should be understood that the role of the amplifier goes beyond that of driving loudspeakers to a given sound pressure level. The amplifier should be able to CONTROL the loudspeakers across the entire music spectrum. This means that parameters such as damping factor (values greater than 60 are acceptable) and dynamic headroom should not be overlooked when comparing amplifiers.

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Amplification

How much power will your new speakers need? That ultimately depends on your listening environment and musical tastes. As little as five watts per channel should drive them to a level satisfactory for background music. A typical 45 watt per channel receiver may fill a room with the compressed mid-band energy of “heavy metal,” but seem to lack weight or control with classical recordings. Some audiophiles feel that 200 watts per channel is the bare minimum to avoid audible clipping distortion when reproducing music at “live” playback levels. Your Legacy speakers are designed to take advantage of “high-powered” amplifiers, so don’t be afraid to put them through their paces.

How much is too much power? Rarely is a drive unit damaged by large doses of music power. More often than not the villain is amplifier clipping distortion. Even through decades of refinement, loudspeakers are still notoriously inefficient transducers, requiring huge amounts of power to recreate the impact of the live performance. Typically less that 1% of electrical power is converted into acoustic output. (For example, an omnidirectional transducer with an anechoic sensitivity of 90 dB @ 1w/1m has a full space efficiency of only 0.63%)

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Amplification

When an amplifier is unable to fulfill your loudspeakers demands, a damaging harmonic spike may be leaked to the high frequency drivers.

Another important point regarding loudness is that the dB scale is a logarithmic one. This means that a 150 Watt amplifier will potentially sound only twice as loud as a 15 Watt amplifier. If all of this discussion of power and loudness seems a bit abstract, consider the example below.

The average acoustical power developed by a person speaking in a conversational tone corresponds to a mere 0.00001 Watts. The power that would be developed by the entire population of the city of New York speaking at once would barely illuminate a single 100 Watt light bulb.

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Speaker Connections

The Terminal Plate

At the rear of each of your loudspeakers you will find a terminal plate housing two rows of jumpered binding posts. The upper row is the input to the "satellite" portion of the speaker. The lower row is the input to the

"subwoofer" portion of the speaker. When left in place, the factory installed jumper bars allow the speaker to be driven with a single channel of amplification. (If biamping, or biwiring, be sure to remove the jumper bars.)

Connect each channel of your amplifier to a loudspeaker via the five-way gold binding posts provided. Dual banana plugs or gold plated spade lugs are recommended means of termination. Be sure that you observe polarity when making the connections. The positive (+) terminal of the amplifier should be connected to the positive terminal of the loudspeaker. The negative (-) terminal of the amplifier should be connected to the negative terminal of the loudspeaker.

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Fine Tuning

To facilitate proper set-up of your speakers in a variety of room situations, we have included several heavy duty toggle switches on the terminal plate, located on the back of the loudspeaker. All switches in the “up” position represent the “anechoic flat” position.

TREBLE Trim: - Nominally flat in the up position

- Negative 2dB at 10 kHz in the down position

(shelving for brighter rooms)

BASS Trim: - Nominally flat in the up position

- Negative 2dB at 60 Hz in the down position

(also raises impedance for budget receivers)

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Specifications

System Type:

Tweeter:

Midrange:

MidWoofer:

Low Frequency Alignment:

Frequency Response:

Impedance:

Sensitivity:

Crossover Frequency:

Dimensions (H x W x D):

Weight:

4 drivers, 3 way

1” dual pole neo ribbon, folded Kapton diaphram

1 x 7” Rohacell reinforced

Silver Graphite, cast frame

2 x 12" spun aluminum diaphragm, rubber surround, total enclosed neo motor, long throw suspension, with cast frame

3rd Order Butterworth

22Hz – 25 kHz

4 Ohms

95 dB

250, 4K

38” X 14” X 13”

80 pounds each

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Notes:

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©2008 Legacy Audio

3023 E Sangamon Ave.

Springfield, IL 62702

Phone: 800-283-4644

Fax: 217-544-1483

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