Crossover mods and speaker efficiancy?

Thanks for your responses. This morning at 6 am I decided to listen to music but had to keep the volume down as my wife and daughter were still sleeping and I realised that in fact I am listening at louder volumes than I used to when it doesn't disturb anyone in the house. There is a lot less distortion and the sound in general is bigger. I have been playing my revised Hales now for 90 hours 24/7 and I'm blown away on just how good the system sounds. It truly was like investing in a brand new pair of speakers without taking the loss on my Hales if I sold them. I never thought my system could sound the way it does regardless of tweeks and mods. I am happy and would reccommend this type of mod to anyone but would beware that it could be a gamble and not everyone is happy with crossover mod results. I got lucky!

Mitch,
Who performed these mods and how much was it? It sounds like a very worthwhile investment and since my Alon's use outboard crossovers it would probably not be difficult to access them, but I'm completely non-handy so I would need someone to do it for me. Of course if you did it yourself I guess I'm out of luck.

Jond, I did not do it myself. I have trouble installing light bulbs.I had a tech do it for me but I ended up waiting for 4 months till he finally did the work and that was only after I bought the parts privately and took them to the tech and said "here are the parts, I'll pay for the labour, please install them". 4 months later I have my speakers back. The moral of this story is find a tech who will do what you want when you want it done. If you buy the parts privately it can have it's advantages. I was fortunate to be introduced by phone to Jeff at Sonicraft, Andre at e-speakers and finally I bought the parts from Michael Percy who was extremely helpful and uncomplicated. I told him what I wanted and he had the parts. Everyone I mentioned above was extremely helpful and patient in helping me. I would reccommend any of the people I mentioned. FIND A TECH WHO HAS THE TIME TO HELP YOU. The advice of people on Audiogon was/is invaluable and I would ask questions on line. If it wasn't for the kind responses on Audiogon to my posts I would have exchanged Axon parts for Solen parts which is like "6 of 1 or half dozen of the other" Good luck!
My mods cost about $1200 but you surely can get alot done for less money. I went wild.

Trelja: Once again, right on the money. As usual, you summed my thoughts up quite well : )

Herman: Mitch stated that the amp is delivering more power, but also sounds much louder and "bigger". As such, it is hard to imagine heavier gauge inductors and lower loss components being "less efficient" or a greater "wattage waster". I do agree that crossover points may have shifted slightly. However, i sincerely doubt that Hales was using THAT sloppy of parts tolerance in their speakers. They would have had to be horribly out of spec to achieve the shift in values that would cause the changes in required drive levels that Mitch is talking about.

I have to agree with Trelja's assessment above. That is, the better that your system gets, the more likely you are to listen to it louder. The lack of grain, glare and distortion are no longer an irritant, so you end up compensating for those factors with increased volume. Not only do you end up "rocking out" more, you end up enjoying it more too.

One problem with this type of situation though. Now that you've increased power transfer into the speakers, reduced passive losses and are also listening louder, the drivers have a LOT more thermal stress to deal with. Be careful. Your either well onto the road of "sonic bliss" or "thermal melt-down". Hopefully, the drivers and crossover freq's / slopes were well chosen by Hales and you won't run into problems. Sean
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Sean, he never said he used "heavier gauge inductors and lower loss components," that is an assumption on your part. He used different components. There is no telling whether they were more or less anything with the limited information given. Perhaps Hales used higher quality components than the modder. If Hales did their job then they listened to a wide variety of components and settled on the one that delivered the best performance (sounded best to them) at their price point. Replacing that component with one that is more expensive may or may not result in better performance. Perhaps a certain value of coil is replaced with "higher quality" heavier guage coil that has the exact same inductance but lower resistance. The new coil will sound different, but will not neccesarily sound better because the speaker was voiced with the higher resistance coil.

In any case, the wasted energy I'm refering to is not in the components, but what is directed around the speakers. A coil in parallel with a tweeter will create a high pass filter and the lower frequency currents will flow through the coil. If am inductor with a different impedance is used then the amount of current will be different, altering the cut off frequency and the amount of current that amp has to deliver.

I also don't accuse Hales of being sloppy with tolerances. Tolerances are what they are. Maybe the coils they used were a little higher than labeled (lets say 10%) but well within spec. Hales doesn't care as long as they got the sound they wanted. If the mod then chooses coils that are a little off the other way (say 10% low) then you have a 20% difference between the new and original, plus the differences in the resistance of the wire.

I guess my point is this. There are too many variables and crossover design is too complicated to answer the original question in a brief post. In general I agree that more money will give better performance, but it never ceases to amaze me that one would assume that just because they spent a lot of money on new cap or coil, that it will perform better than the component the manufacturer chose.