Rockville propietary monitor cable: fix, replace, throw in Mississipi River?

eyefloater

New member
I got a free set of rockville apm5 monitors a while back from a friend, and what can i say, they've done their job. A few weeks ago i started to periodically lose signal in the right speaker, and turns out the cable connecting them is fritzed. before i got out the soddering iron, i figured i'd look around for replacements. Emailing rockville got me a rude and poorly spelled response about two weeks later. So i'm gonna go with trying to fix it. But failing that, and given that i can't afford a new pair of monitors at the moment, can anyone ID this propietary 4-pin cable for me, in case i need to replace it? google hasn't turned up much. also:

since i'm stuck w them for now, i kinda don't even wanna know, but what's the general reputation of these monitors?

New to this forum, excited to get these fixed and back to learning the dark arts of home recording here :PIMG_0227.JPGIMG_0228.JPG
 
Perhaps your money is better spent on a good soldering supplies and some rudimentary diagnostic tools like a volt meter.
You're gonna need stuff like that anyway just to maintain the many connections your studio will someday have.

Most probably, you could take the connectors apart; use a voltmeter (or just your eyes) to see what's connected to what; and repair. If it's definitely the cables, then you might have to snip off a few inches if there's a break.

OR build new cables. No problem.

OR replace with standard connectors on both cables and amp. Still no problem.

No need tossing anything. This is pretty simple stuff of the kind that most home-studio types have cut their teeth on somewhere along the way.
 
The screw lock connectors are dirt cheap, and I suspect got chosen because they lock, and n' be mixed up with the other connector types. Inside will be ordinary twin core cable. As Ponder5 says, just open them up. Two small buckets to solder. Most faults will be caused by flexing? Have you been wiggling them? It's not a complicated soldering job, and if you really can't or don't want to learn - ask your facebook friends - one is bound to be able to solder! Most shops that sell CB/business radios will have these connectors in stock - and the cable is nothing special at all - doesn't even need to be round! Chances are that it's just a dry joint. A dab with the iron and a. bit of new solder will fix it.
 
That's a common Amphenol connector best known for being used on microphones in the 60s. You can still get them.

Most likely you can resolder your cable.
 
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The connectors will probably be fine, solder new cable to the old connectors. I do have Old mics in my collection that use that type of connector.

Alan.
 
There was indeed a loose wire, which i soldered and got signal back into the right speaker.

But then a new thing - a whole lot of distortion on the bass, little machine farts with every beat, and definitely coming from the speaker. With two days left to deliver the guitar tracks i promised my band, i've been making a lot of hasty decisions, and I concluded it was probably caused by the large dent in the front of the cone. Best idea i could think of was to carefully insert a tiny, angled wire thru the front of the cone to pull it back into sh... and tear a massive hole in it. So yeah.

now i guess i just do my best to track the DI guitar - monitoring not toooo important there i imagine, and then until the final reamping happens (in the room everyone else played), see how it mixes in for now w amp sim and reverb etc, monitoring w my pretty terrible headphones but also with a bass practice amp (1x12, crate) set up on the right side, EQd to kinda sorta match the remaining monitor.

do monitors like these, where the pair of RCAs go into one and then a cable goes to the other have crossover built into them?
now that i'm sending one rca into the remaining monitor, and the other thru a RCAstereo-to-1/4mono splitter (er, uniter) and into the bass amp, am i gonna get a different stereo image - without a center? does that matter?

this is crazy town, i know. pretty fun tho...
 
Normally, they do have a crossover in the passive unit, and use two core cable, but when you repaired the connector, the clue is in the cores - were all four used? If so the crossover is in the main unit, if only two, it's in the passive one.

If you have destroyed the main driver, then any attempt to use different speakers to restore two, is going to really mess things up. What I'd do, is to use headphones for checking stereo, and then mix on one speaker in mono. This isn't as bad as you think, because mono really focuses your brain. With two speakers, in stereo your mixes sound really good, and deep. Try to mix in mono and getting the balance right can be really much harder - but when you do, it sounds even better in stereo. We do a fair bit of clip track work - we record perfectly normally, and do rough mixes, but then click goes to left, usually with count-ins and title, and all the backing track goes right. We usually do a stereo rough mix with every instrument - like a normal recording, then we drop out all the instruments that will be played leaving the 'extras' and getting this thinned out mix right, in mono - is damned hard. EQ becomes more important. I guess stereo just is easy on the ears.

I'd not suggest even thinking that a bodged together system will work well when played back in stereo on a decent system. You just won't be happy. Maybe even though I don't like headphone mixes, this could be the safest solution?
 
do monitors like these, where the pair of RCAs go into one and then a cable goes to the other have crossover built into them?
now that i'm sending one rca into the remaining monitor, and the other thru a RCAstereo-to-1/4mono splitter (er, uniter) and into the bass amp, am i gonna get a different stereo image - without a center? does that matter?

this is crazy town, i know. pretty fun tho...

AH, okay. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're not dealing with what we'd strictly call a 'monitor'. These RCA crosswiring schemes are consumer speaker techniques to add spatial feel to the sound. They take a little from this side and send it to that side and vice-versa. So there's probably a bit more than a crossover inside the speaker.

Now, the setup often sounds pleasing in a Bose sort of way, but it's not accurate. In fact, they go to great lengths to make it inaccurate. Accurate, in a low power, small driver setup is often not a comfortable sound. So they introduce these tricks to make a little bookshelf unit sound big and luscious. It's not without merit.

Your best bet is to simply run a single cable - the heavy ones in question - to each speak. If you get sound, you got it. If it sounds wimpy and a little clock-radio-ish, then you're probably hearing the real deal. That's whatcha got. Sucks, but we've all been there.

But that might not be what it is, because, after reading it again, I'm not sure what exactly you're doing.

I've played with a lot of caved-in cones. No distortion. "Little machine farts" are probably coil related BUT with the extra RCA circuitry, it could be a lotta things. First see if you can run without the cross wiring.
 
Is this the type of monitor you are running? Interesting design choices, more like home computer speakers than the normal active monitors. While it cuts down on cabling and power cords, it doesn't seem to be a particularly robust system based on reading some comments online. I can't comment on the sound quality, since I've never heard them.

https://www.rockvilleaudio.com/apm8c/
 
Usually a 'dent in the cone' isn't in the cone at all, but the dust cover. It's in the center of the speaker and usually round.(as in dome shaped)
It is there to keep dust out of the voice coil which is directly behind it. A dent, while unsightly, isn't going to hurt anything, and there are less invasive ways to pop out the dent.
:D
 
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