Green Wagon Posted February 11, 2016 Posted February 11, 2016 (edited) What am I doing with a pair of speakers ? Fixing them ???? Came in with a reported fault of a non functioning tweeter that the owner had traced to a faulty crossover after swapping tweeters from side to side. Pretty things aren't they. 6" and 1" After removing the drivers, and wadding, and terminal cups, I'm left with two xovers. Mmm yes one is not like the other. Ew. Yeah I can't see why one has no treble. Why use a soldering iron when you can just hit it with a cold hammer. After a chat with the owner he decided to go with a 'basic' rebuild. The 15uF electrolytic is in series with a 1.2ohm for the zobel. Replacing the electro (0.6ohms) with the foil cross-cap (0.01ohm) I adjusted the series resistor up from 1.2ohm to 1.8ohm to keep it true to the original tuning. The 8.2uF is in series with the tweeter so I've put a Vishay bypass on the underside of the board to help smooth it out that little extra. And if anyone wants to reverse engineer the crossovers, have at it Oh yes, the cored inductor is marked as a 0.75mH. Didn't bother measuring the air core. EDIT - The air core is a 0.24mH @ 1ohm. Edited February 12, 2016 by Green Wagon 5
pete_mac Posted February 11, 2016 Posted February 11, 2016 Ew. Yeah I can't see why one has no treble. Why use a soldering iron when you can just hit it with a cold hammer. Wowsers! Nasty!! I recently repaired a pair of Focal speakers which had an intermittent tweeter in one speakers. The factory soldering was very, very light-on and soldering on the series tweeter resistor had failed completely.
Guest Posted February 11, 2016 Posted February 11, 2016 (edited) Yikes! That crossover has been manhandled quite badly. There's no way it came from the factory like that! It would be interesting to hear how much different the re-capping makes. Anyone who thinks LS3/5As are special should listen to a pair of these. The best are the last few years of production from around 2003 and are distinguished by being made in real timber veneer (book matched). Stick them on a high end amp like a McIntosh or a Electrocompaniet and prepare to be amazed at how that something that sold under $1k can be. Edited February 11, 2016 by Guest
Green Wagon Posted February 11, 2016 Author Posted February 11, 2016 I was rather shocked at the bludgeoning of those joints. The rest are obviously factory and look really good. All I know is he bought these second hand and has never had any issues till now. He had a listen here before taking them home and seemed really happy with the improvement. I had them running for a full day, started out grainy and pretty poo, but as the caps broke in they started sounding much much better. Doing a bit of research there seems to be several versions with the only real difference being an mdf back instead of chipboard, painted driver holes, and some confusion over what the drivers are. These must be earlier ones as they are vinyl wrapped. But then they must also be later ones as the driver holes are painted, and as you'll see from the pics on the linked site, have a later/better crossover. so I'm thinking theres at least 3 revisions. Vinyl, unpainted holes, terminal mounted crossovers (two types of crossover board, but same parts etc). Vinyl, painted holes, internal better crossovers. veneer, painted, ??? Link to a dutch site, translated, but still a little hard to understand --> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.htforum.nl%2Fyabbse%2Findex.php%3Ftopic%3D80902.0&edit-text=&act=url Refer pic, fully painted fronts including the driver holes. Also note these are grey, whereas the linked ones all have what looks like black fronts.
Guest Posted February 12, 2016 Posted February 12, 2016 Yes, there were at least two versions sold in Australia. The 42s were preceded by Audience 40s, then there was the 42 in vinyl wrap with black grilles, and later real wood veneer and grey grilles, which coincided with crossover changes, heavier cabinets (thicker baffle and denser cabinet walls) and other minor tweaks. I purchased a pair of Audience 42s online that had different bass drivers in them. You couldn't tell from outside but the bass drivers only had small voice coils, not the three inch coil with internal magnet. Otherwise they looked the real thing, although they certainly didn't sound anywhere near as good as I expected. I sold them on but have wondered ever since whether they were very careful counterfeits, or whether they were an earlier version from Dynaudio. They didn't sound good enough to my ear to be Dynaudios, but the person who bought them from me was very happy indeed.
Green Wagon Posted February 12, 2016 Author Posted February 12, 2016 (edited) With all the hoohaa dyn make of not having a vc smaller than half of the driver diameter, I'd say it sounds like you got a knock off. EDIT, and just for anyone else trying to find info, heres the drivers used in this particular version of the 42's... Edited February 12, 2016 by Green Wagon
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