Redid the Oak speakers

Gentle reader,

You may recall the homemade solid oak speakers I found at Salvation Army. Well, after listening to them a while, I decided I liked the way they sound AND look better than the all-black A/D/S/ tower speakers.

My one concern was the lack of deep bass. The previous post about them:
The Robb Collections: Yet MORE speakers. Foreign LPs and more....
shows them as I bought them.

I decided to take a look inside and found that the drivers (woofer and tweeter) are Radio Shack units. I looked them up on:
Index to Speaker Systems and Components and found that the woofer was only good down to 50 Hertz.

A check of the Parts Express website: Parts Express: the #1 source for audio, video & speaker building components
listed their own Dayton Brand 6 1/2" Classic woofer extended bass down to 30 Hertz and they were on sale for less than $25 each. So, I bought two and looked at tweeters.

I found on closeout a pair of Foster cast aluminum 3' by 7" horn tweeters originally $100, now only $15. Previous buyers were raving about them, so I ordered two as well. They are rated at 100 decibels at 1 watt. Now THAT is efficient! So, I'd need to use the L-pads on the back of the cabinets to balance the output with the woofers less efficient 89 decibels. Here they are:
I would need to do some creative woodworking to make these rectangles fit in a round hole!

However, upon listening to them on top of the cabinet, I felt they sounded tinny and just not right. Plus, the Radio Shack tweeters sounded really good.

Now, the Maryland fella that built these babies, used about 10 gauge wire with fairly thick individual copper strands. And a heck of a lot of solder! I had the dickens of a time de-soldering all those connections! Plus, screws alone were not enough for him. Even the crossovers (they divide the high notes for the tweeters and low notes for the woofers), were screwed and glued down with RTV silicone glue!

Since I'd also bought new heavy-duty crossovers, I had to get the old ones and all that wiring out. I destroyed the old crossovers trying to get them out! Pity as they looked like good ones.

SO, anyway. Once I had gotten all the parts and fiberglass out, then began the changes necessary to overhaul and upgrade the parts, I discovered one of the TINY wires on the old tweeter had come off the terminal. Oh, boy, this is not good. I'm talking hair-thin wiring.

I was able to fix it, but not until after ordering new Dayton Silk dome tweeters to match all the
other Dayton stuff from Parts Express. Here they are along with the Dayton woofers:
So, I get those pretty new tweeters in and decide they don't sound as good as the old ones!
Fickle, I know.

So, out they came and in go the old ones, again. But what to do with these nice new tweeters?
Since I had to remove the plastic port tubes and close those holes, I decided to put the new
tweeters there. Which explains why the tweeters in the picture above are below the woofers.

After MUCH work I get them all together and find that same old tweeter problem had cropped up again. Whew! What a job, but I succeeded at last reattaching the tiny wire again.

So, now with twice the number of tweeters, they sound great! The woofers go nice and deep. They LOOK so much better than those black towers. As you can see:
As far as the back, you may recall I adapted three-way binding posts to the old spring terminals. Since I'd disassembled the speakers in here, ( my home office, see below) I now had these nice terminal cups with expensive three-way binding posts. Since I wasn't using the L-pads he'd installed after all, I put the cups in their place.

I covered the hole for the old terminals at the bottom of the box and simply filled the holes in the plastic with black RTV glue. Boxes are nice and air-tight.
Now, I'd planned to sell the DCM Timeframe speakers shown in the previous post sometime in the future. I'd brought the black towers and the DCMs in here and tried a comparison of those two and the speakers that I rebuilt a few years ago and decided the DCMs sound MUCH better!

SO, I disassembled the speakers I've been using in here, (see: The Robb Collections: Rubberize your woofers! ) sold the parts and now the DCMs live here in my home office. They take up much less floor space and produce a great sound stage.

Maybe next time I'll finally do a post comparing the two Sony SACD/DVD players. Until then,
thanks for looking!

Scott