replacement speakers.

[wado1942]

I've probably logged into this forum 3 times over the last 2 years so I'm a bit of a noob on that aspect so I don't know if this was covered already.
I have a set of home stereo speakers from like 1971 in pretty decent cabinets. The tweeters are paper cone drivers with a nasty spike around 5-6KHz and little above 10KHz or so. I'm thinking I'd like to replace them. For starters, would it be more practical to just replace everything? I rather like the Peridigm Titans but they're a bit pricy, plus I'd rather my wife not notice I bought new speakers since she doesn't notice audio problems like I do. The cabinets I have are of decent quality and good size so I think I'd rather just update the internal componants if it's more cost effective.

If I change the tweeters, do you think I should also change the woofers? The woofers have a pretty good response down to about 60Hz (best guess) with a hump around 120Hz. Either way, I know the impedance has to match but assume I want tweeters with the same sensitivity as the woofers right? I pretty much never see tweeters that are even close to the sensitivity of mid and low range drivers.

So how should I go about doing this? Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

[JCD]

Changing the tweeters will almost certainly require a redo of your crossover. Each crossover is custom made for the specifics of the drivers installed.

As for changing the woofers -- if they're from 1971, they've probably degraded enough that replacement would be a good idea.. however, the size, shape and crossover details (again) of that box are specific to the woofer/tweeter combination.

I think this is a long winded way of saying it'd probably be better to start from scratch rather than shoe horn in some different drivers into your existing cabinet.

JCD

[wado1942]

I'm familiar with crossovers. The speakers in the cabinets now are 8 ohm so if I replace them with 8 ohm drivers, I do not need to change the crossovers.

Thanks for the quick reply though.

[Geoff St. Germain]

The rated impedance of the drivers is not the only possible difference between the current tweeter and whatever you replace it with. There could be differences in sensitivity, requiring difference amounts of padding in the crossover, differences in tolerated crossover points (if for example the current tweeter is crossed over lower than the new one should be) and other places as well.

[wado1942]

I understand. It's a pretty simple equasion to figure out what the current crossover point is, so all I have to do is get a new tweeter with the same or lower LF rolloff slope. But you've confirmed my suspicion that I'd have to change both drivers, not just the tweeters because there's no way for me to know the sensitivity (which is relative anyways).

[sparky77]

Goldwood makes very good and inexpensive replacements that match the sizes and shapes of many older speaker system components and even have very close t/s paramenters, plus you can order them from Parts Express. If you want response graphs of the parts just send an email to them off their website.

http://www.goldwoodsound.com

You might just be able to replace part for part and they're just look a little newer.

[drf]

Geoff St. Germain wrote:

The rated impedance of the drivers is not the only possible difference between the current tweeter and whatever you replace it with. There could be differences in sensitivity, requiring difference amounts of padding in the crossover, differences in tolerated crossover points (if for example the current tweeter is crossed over lower than the new one should be) and other places as well.

Add to that the possible need to allow for cone breakup, notching unwanted spikes, BSC and a custom a built zobel for each driver.