Broken Clarity owner with troubleshooting experience

Hello fellow ML lovers... well at this point I am "in like" with my speakers.

I have spent the last two months trying to find someone in the Baltimore -Washington DC area that can work on Martin Logans. Much to my surprise that shop does not seem to exist. I let two shops use my broken clarity as a paper weight for over two weeks each. Invigorated by the "professional" ineptness I called Martin Logan to execute the troubleshooting. Once I started swapping panels, power supplies, and bases I quickly understood this speaker was meant to be worked on by its owner.

The point is if something goes wrong with an ML (at least Clarity's) pick up your skirt, grab your balls, and go get your tools. Its another joy of ML's is the fact you get to be apart of making them sing again if something goes down.

How about some background? Have you had the Clarity's since new? Were the shops you took them to ML dealers? Would be interesting to hear more details about what lead you to finally call them. What was happening with the speakers to make you realize something was wrong with them?

Thanks and welcome aboard... btw, you can let go of your balls now.

I purchased my ML Clarity's preowned, I believe they were purchased in 2004.

At first they sounded great, but I noticed one sounded dimmer than the other. I just chalked this up to the "soundstage" recording until it was common among all music. I didn't let the prospect of getting hoodwinked keep me down, the speakers overall were a marked improvement over my former Boston Towers. But then the sound diminished significantly and my Pioneer VSX-49TXi began self protecting at -15. Well this ****ing sucks! I swapped speakers and confirmed it was not the cabling or receiver.

Called ML, turns out there are no authorized repair shops in the Baltimore-Washington DC area... that's kind of a shocker not to have a recommended repair shop near a major metro. Well two unauthorized audio shops and one month later I still have no idea whats wrong. Pretty pathetic considering ML and I troubleshooted and fixed the problem in a week.

When I called ML to get shipping info the rep offered to help me troubleshoot it (where the hell were you a month ago?!). He gave me an instrucitve pdf and asked me to try swapping panels, problem did not follow the stat. This made the rep confident the power supply was failing, so I had one overnighted. I swapped it out with the alleged broken one and the panel still sounded distorted at volume. So I removed the base and checked that my wiring was accurate and connections tight... still have the problem. So I decided to swap bases and see if the problem is a component on the base or something in the cabinet. Fortunately, the problem followed the base. On the Clarity, there are only two components on the base: Power Supply and Audio Transformer. Well the PS is new, so I confirmed that was not the problem by swapping back in the alleged broken PS. The speaker made the same sound confirming the audio transformer was the issue. I had one shipped out, arrived yesterday and for the rest of the evening I was sipping Macallan 12 listening to all the tracks I wanted for the last month and a half.

I learned that owners should not be afraid to open up a broken Clarity and troubleshoot with ML. The speaker is repair friendly and my fix required no soldering. I hope this helps other. Also, is there a way to upload the PDF's from ML? I tried to do it with this post but they were to large (96kb).

PS: Look for a question I pose in the general forum about Audio Transformers. I am interested to hear the forums feedback.