LEGACY Cinema HD Loudspeaker System Owner’s Manual

Owners Manual For The
Cinema HD
Loudspeaker System

Owners Record

Thank you for selecting a Legacy Loudspeaker System. These handcrafted instruments will provide you with many years of listening enjoyment.
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: Cinema HD
Serial No:————————————–
Date of purchase:—————————-
Register your product at legacyaudio.com/register
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The Cabinetry/Our Commitment

Handcrafted
Beneath the surface of Cinema HD’s elegant exterior lies rigid MDF construction. Interlocking joinery maximizes the strength of the cabinet parts.
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”.

Warranty

Legacy Audio supports its customers and products with pride. We cheerfully warrant the loud-speaker products we manufacture from defects in materials and workmanship for a period of seven (7) years. Electronic components such as internal amplifiers and digital processors are covered for three (3)years. Please register your product with Legacy Audio. Should you require service Legacy will require proof of purchase in order to honor the warranty – so please keep your receipt.

• The warranty applies to the original owner and is not transferable.
• The warranty applies to products purchased from an “Authorized Legacy Dealer”.
• The warranty on active components such as digital processors or internal amplifiers is limited to three (3) years of coverage.
• The warranty on dealer stock will extend for a maximum of two years from the invoice.

The warranty does not cover transportation costs of the product to or from the customer, distributor or dealer, or related shipping damage.

Exclusions from Warranty
The following situations or conditions are not covered by the Legacy Audio warranty:

• Accidental damage, electrical abuse or associated equipment failure.
• Use inconsistent with recommended operating instructions and specifications
• Damage caused by modification or unauthorized service
• Costs associated with the removal and reinstallation of defective products. Consequential damage to other products.
• Normal wear such as fading of finishes due to sunlight.

Unpacking Your Speakers

Your new speaker system has been very carefully packaged to ensure that it travels to you safely. Each speaker is protected by a double-wall outer carton with heavy V-board corner protectors. Custom fitted foam end caps are used to protect the elegant cabinetry, and a custom bag is included to provide further protection. Please save this packing for future transportation. If cartons become damaged or misplaced, new ones can be purchased from Legacy Audio.

Speaker Placement

To allow more flexibility in seating arrangements, your Legacy loudspeaker is designed for broad lateral coverage. The 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 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.

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.

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.

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 require 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 in 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.

Amplification

Ideally, the loudspeaker would be among the first components selected when assembling a play- back 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.

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 are 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 though decades of refinement, loudspeakers are still notoriously inefficient transducers, requiring huge amounts of power to recreate the impact of the live performance. Typically less than 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
the efficiency of only 0.63%)

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.

Speaker Connections

The Terminal Plate
At the rear of your loudspeaker, you will find one row of binding posts.
Connect each channel of your amplifier to the loudspeaker via the 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.

Specifications

| System Type:| 3 driver, 2 way
---|---|---
Tweeter:| (1)  1” dual pole AMT folded ribbon
Midwoofer:| (2)  5.25”  Silver  Graphite, cast
basket
Low  Frequency Alignment:| B5 Reflex
Frequency Response:| 59 Hz – 25 kHz
Impedance:| 4 Ohm
Recommended Amplification:| 15 – 150 Watts
Sensitivity:| 90  dB
Crossover Frequency:| 3K
Binding Post:| 1 Pair recessed cup
Dimensions (H x W x D):| 6.5” X 18” X 8.5”
Weight:| 18 lbs

CE Declaration of Conformity
Legacy Audio
3023 E. Sangamon Ave.
Springfield, IL 62702 USA 800-283-4644
States that this product is in conformity with the essential requirements and other relevant provisions of:
Low Voltage Directive 2006/95/EC
EMC Directive 2004/108/EC

All information contained in this manual is accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of publication. In keeping with our policy of ongoing product improvement, we reserve the right to make changes to the design and features of our products without prior notice.

WEEE Compliance

Product Disposal – Certain international, national, and/or local laws and/or regulations may apply regarding the disposal of this product. For further detailed information, please contact the retailer where you purchased this product or the Legacy Audio Distributor in your country. A listing of Legacy Audio Distributors can be found on the  Legacy Audio website www.legacyaudio.com or by contacting Legacy Audio at: 3023 E. Sangamon Ave., Springfield, IL 62702, USA—Phone: +1 217 544-3178.

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