Legacy Signature III User manual

2
Registration
3. Owners Record
4. The Cabinetry / Our Commitment
Setup
5. Unpacking Your Speakers
6. Speaker Placement
9. Hook up Cables
12. Amplification
16. Speaker Connections
17. Fine-tuning
Technology
18. Designer’s Note
23. Specifications

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The model and serial numbers are located on the rear of the unit. Record
these numbers in the spaces provided below. Refer to them when calling
upon your dealer regarding this product.
Model No. _______________________________
Serial No. _______________________________
Date of purchase: _________________________
Thank you for selecting a Legacy Loudspeaker System. These hand-
crafted instruments will provide you with many years of listening
enjoyment. Please take a few moments to read this brief manual to insure
maximum benefit from your speaker system.

4
Handcrafted
Beneath the surface of Signature III’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”.

5
Your new speaker system has been very carefully packaged to insure that
it travels to you safely. Each speaker is protected by a double-wall 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.

6
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 the axis normal to the
loudspeaker baffle. Assuming a listener distance of about ten feet, begin
by placing the speakers approximately 7 feet apart and about 1 – 3 feet
from the wall behind them. In most rooms this will afford a speaker
position at least 2 feet or more from the side walls. The amount of
recommended "toe-in" is a function of the listening angle. As the overall
listening angle increases from 40 degrees, the amount of toe-in should
increase. Your Legacy speaker is optimized for a flat response in the far
field. Best results are obtained vertically with the listener's ear at tweeter
level with the loudspeakers gently toed in toward the listener. Increasing
the degree of toe-in is recommended when placement next to sidewalls is
required. Placing the loudspeaker or the listener near a room boundary
will generally increase low frequency impact. If you are forced to position
one or both of your loudspeakers in a corner, be prepared to reduce bass
output via the control switches on the rear terminal plate of each
loudspeaker. You may also wish to reduce low frequency output with your
preamp's bass tone control.

7
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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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.

9
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.

10
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 omni-
directional transducer with an anechoic sensitivity of 90 dB @ 1w/1m has
a full space efficiency of only 0.63%)