Legacy FOCUS XD Owner's Manual

Page 2 of 33 Introduction & Background 17-18 Rear Panel 19 Configurations Technology Continuing the Pursuit of Perfection 28-29 Registration Owners Record 3 The Cabinetry / Our Commitment 4 Warranty 5 Setup Unpacking Your Speakers 6 Speaker Installation 7 Hooking Up Cables 8-9 Amplification 10-12 Foot Installation 13-16 Focus XD Full Range Powered 20 Bi-Amp with Internal Passive Crossover 21 Bi-Amp with Wavelet 22-23 Bi-Amp with Wavelaunch 24-25

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. 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. Page 3 of 33

Handcrafted Beneath the surface of FOCUS XD’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”. Page 4 of 33

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 a 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 invoice. The warranty does not cover transportation costs of 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. Warranty Page 5 of 33

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. Unpacking Your Speakers Page 6 of 33

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. Page 7 of 33

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 ef- fect is well out of the audio bandwidth; inductance can be de- creased (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 Page 8 of 33

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 control- ling factor of the amplifier/loudspeaker interface. Excessive resistance can cause ma- jor shifts of speaker crossover frequencies. The lower the impedance of the loud- speaker, 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 onehalf deci- bel. 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. Hooking Up Cables Page 9 of 33

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 under- stood 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 mu- sic 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. Page 10 of 33

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 advan- tage 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 noto- riously 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 efficiency of only 0.63%) Page 11 of 33

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. 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. Page 12 of 33

Step 2 - Locate the cone feet set. It will be inside the foam pieces that held the speaker in the box. Foot Installation Page 13 of 33

Step 4 - Thread the cone insert into the cabinet. Foot Installation Page 14 of 33

may stop here. Step 6 - Place the leveling washer onto the cone. Foot Installation Page 15 of 33

cone until your speaker is level. Foot Installation Page 16 of 33

• Use this internal ICEpower amp with its 30 amp peak current capability to drive the entire speaker full range via the passive internal crossover. Merely a source and a preamplifier are required to drive FOCUS XD to breathtaking levels. This is a common configuration for studios and those with DAC/Preamps. • Allocate the internal amp’s 750 watts entirely to the bass section to power the lower 12” woofers of Focus XD, while driving the upper section with your external amplifier. This method of passive bi-amplification minimizes current demands from the upper range amplifier and reduces the presence of back EMF from the woofers. Your amplifier will work less hard and the speaker will sound more effortless. • Utilize an external crossover such as the Legacy Wavelet or Wavelaunch processors. Link the woofers directly to the internal amp, eliminating the passive crossover from the path. This improves coupling with the woofers and increases drive efficiency by nearly 30%. Both the Wavelet and Wavelaunch processors are presently available with customized settings for the FOCUS XD. The renowned Legacy FOCUS is now available in both the award winning SE version and the powered XD version. Be careful to understand the FOCUS XD is not a replacement for the FOCUS SE, but a more versatile internally amplified version of the same, facilitating both passive and active bi-amplification. The fully passive FOCUS SE will continue to hold its position in the Legacy line-up. The new FOCUS XD version includes a high quality internal 750 watts amplifier which provides some unique performance options: Page 17 of 33

present level of precision and performance. Audiophiles, studio professionals and home theater integrators recognize the FOCUS SE as the go-to reference of full rangespeakers. It earned this reputation by going deeper and cleaner with greater dynamics than speakers at more than twice the cost. The FOCUS SE Legacy re-introduced AMT ribbon tweeters to the industry with a whole new efficiency level. The increased volume velocity of the pleated diaphragms was achieved with high efficiency magnetic structures and high temperature Kapton diaphragms. The Dual AMTs provide more uniform dispersion while cast frame silver/graphite woven 7” midranges offer exceedingly low mass with the high efficiencyover the widest bandwidth, owing collectively to a stiffer, long throw suspension, a superior motor structure and a custom phase plug. Patented Aura encapsulated motors on the dual subwoofers allow FOCUS to reach deeper with lower distortion and greater output. Each inductor is hand wound to a precise value. The capacitors used are some of the finest available from Clarity in Great Britain. The Silver HF is supplied by Kimber. The crossover is designed, and fine-tuned by our chief engineer, Bill Dudleston. Each pair is carefully matched under his personal supervision. With the addition of the 750 watts of internal power, users can take full advantage of bi-amplification benefits: lower harmonic distortion, reduced back EMF (better damping), greater dynamic range and reduced intermodulation. Page 18 of 33

lection of ribbon tweeters from the world over and always loved the way good ribbons reproduced the swishing sound of brushes on a snare- and the simple honesty in the reproduction of strings without imparting an edgy ringing effect found in most tweeters. There’s just something right about the sound – like a C12 mic capsule. If one could increase the dynamics to natural levels and extend the range of ribbons without beaming undesirably, the benefit would be considerable musically. I have always been a proponent of low mass, high acceleration drive elements. The acceleration capability of the drivers ultimately determines the transient or waveform tracing capability of the loudspeaker. To build a better speaker, one MUST first acknowledge that loudspeakers are dread- fully slow by nature. Their responsiveness lags the electrical waveforms settling time by orders of magnitude (Logically so, if one contrasts the mass of an electron to the mass of a speaker dia- phragm.). Typical of transducers (devices that convert one form of energy to another), speakers are also ex- tremely inefficient -wasting more than 98% of their input power in the form of heat and out of phase motion. For these two reasons I have been working with speaker driver motors with magnetic field strengths as high as 2 Tesla (60,000 times the field strength of our planet Earth) to overcome these limita- tions. With such field strength, greater levels of articulation are possible at the lower limits of a transducer. For example, the reproduction of a simple strike of a heavy anvil will reveal tones that are richer, darker and more complex than otherwise possible. In 2006 Legacy Audio introduced our first air motion transducer; a modernized version of the AMT tweeter developed by Oskar Heil in the 1970s. Legacy’s first version utilizes a folded Kapton (not mylar) diaphragm and R45 neodymium wafers instead of ceramic magnets. The result was higher efficiency and greater power handling. This translated to significant gains in dynamic range and reduced distortion. We soon adapted an existing 4” planar ribbon (the one with the round faceplate) to work in conjunction with this tweeter to facilitate the voicing of the hand-off to our 7” driver. Continuing the Pursuit of Perfection (Legacy Air Motion Ribbons) Page 28 of 33

smoothest high efficiency 8” midrange built to date. I have yet to find a driver to challenge it. This silky 8” mid has a range of 7 octaves with nary a wrinkle in the response, yet a sensitivity of 98 dB. My initiative of providing a 4” AMT that could compliment these capabilities was met with the challenge of accordion-folding sixteen square inches of Kapton into the 4” long, 1” wide chamber. Neodymium again was employed to provide the flux density required. But the solution was made even more elegant by mounting the new 4” ribbon on the same faceplate as its complementary 1” AMT ribbon super-tweeter. The results were more uniform dispersion and tremendous attack. Treble now had weight instead of tizz. A natural fullness in the treble is exhibited that reminds us why we love high-end audio so much. The effortless way it forcefully squeezes out acoustic energy is readily verified by placing ones hand over the driver faceplate and feeling the suction against your palm (nope, you won’t hurt it). These new drivers may be refined, but are equally rugged. I am fortunate to have chosen loudspeaker development as my life’s work. It has utilized my chemical engineering, physics and mathe- matics background almost daily. It has offered moments of both humility and glory, but most gratifying is the reward of continual, stair- stepped successes even after 30 years. I sense that this is a never ending staircase to be followed for generations as we asymptotically approach unattainable perfection. Bill Dudleston, Chief Designer, Founder of Legacy Audio Continuing the Pursuit of Perfection (Legacy Air Motion Ribbons) Page 29 of 33

Tweeter: Dual Air Motion Tweeter System- 1" AMT super tweeter, Kimber silver HF wire Impedance: 4 Ohms Sensitivity: 95.4 dB Midrange: Dual Air Motion Tweeter System- 4" AMT tweeter Midwoofer: 2 x 7” Silver Graphite, cast frame Recommended Amplification: 1 channel of 30 Watts or greater required for passive upper range configurations Crossover Frequency: 120, 2.8K, 8K Inputs: 1 Pair binding posts for upper range 1 XLR balanced for bass Dimensions (H x W x D): 55 X 14 X 15.375 Shipping Weight: 182 pounds Shipping Dimensions (H x W xD): 62 x 22 x 22 Low Frequency Alignment: Assisted 6th order, Butterworth, vented Woofer: 2 x 12" spun aluminum diaphragm, rubber surround, total enclosed neo motor, long throw suspension, with cast frame Internal Amplification: 750 Watt ICEpower® amplifier Frequency Response: 18Hz – 30 kHz Page 30 of 33

Springfield, IL 62702 USA 800-283-4644 States that this product is in conformity with the with the essential requirements and other relevant provisions of: Low Voltage Directive 2006/95/EC EMC Directive 2004/108/EC CE Declaration of Conformity 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. Page 31 of 33

3023 E Sangamon Ave. Springfield, IL 62702 Phone: 800-283-4644 Fax: 217-544-1483 Page 33 of 33