Having managed to buy the amp at a bargain price and then installed it into the system the results were anti-climatic.
It became clear that the amp was not driving the second voice coil on one of the speakers. After a bit of investigation I discovered that one of the speakers had an intermittent connection on the second voice coil. This may have been the first time that the second coil had been used on these speakers so the problem may well have been there for a long time.
I was then concerned about the cost of getting this problem fixed and could see my bargain purchase was going to become less of a bargain. I did try and check the wiring but the wires disappeared into the body of the speaker somewhere and I was not able to follow the cable all the way inside.
So, I got in touch with AG in Scotland to find out if they could help. Stephen at AG was very helpful and he described how to get acces to the bass driver. I did attempt to slide the bass drive out but gave up after deciding I might cause damage to the body of the speaker. Whilst re-assembling the speaker I did manage to make things worse by breaking some more wires off the treble control switch!
So off to AG they got shipped.
The best case was they would find a problem with the wiring but if not it was going to be new drivers. They did not have any Ref 3 drivers but could fit some from the Ref 3.5 model. I was a bit concerned about having a hybrid version of these speakers especially when I come to sell them. Fortunately the problem turned out to be a dry joint in the wiring so no additional expense incurred to buy and fit new drivers.
The speakers are now back at home, setup with the new amp and I am enjoying the music with a little more oomph at the lower frequencies.
So thanks to Volante (Neil) for the original post about these amps being available.
Plus the support from AG to solve the problem was great and they only charged me the courier costs to get them there and back.
