Switching out tweeters


For you speaker tweakers.  I still love my old Snell Type D speakers but, as my ears age, I might be loving the metal dome tweeters less and less.  So, I'm wondering about switching them out for some soft dome.  I am going to start some research on this subject but hoping to get some feedback from those with first-hand experience with this type of stuff.  

I know some will probably say to just buy new speakers, and I am always perusing the local used selection.  (Just picked up some pretty sweet Dali Helicon 400 and getting to know them.)  The Snells are not going anywhere and getting old so I figure some upgrading might be worth messing around with anyway.  I am pretty handy and this could be a fun distraction for me short of buying a kit.  Which I would also like to do in the future.  

Thanks for any constructive thoughts.

pkatsuleas

Metal dome tweeters can be pretty unforgiving, but swapping out a tweeter is a significant undertaking to get it right.  The whole crossover is built around  implementing those specific drivers together....more so with Snell than most, because they actually tweak the values for each set of drivers.  

Do those tweeters happen to be ferrofluid cooled?  If so, it might be time to clean it out of magnet gap and replace with fresh FF.  

Another you thing you might consider is to upgrade old caps and resistors, especially if there are any electrolytics in the tweeter path.  You don't need to go crazy with expensive boutique caps, but a decent basic polypropylene film cap like a Solen, Sonicap, Audyn, etc, could help clean things up.  Be forewarned that IME, good caps take some time burn in, and may sound quite bright and brittle when new, but have patience, they'll come around.  

Most of those old cast resistors have an inductive byproduct that doesn't help either.  You can replace same values with wirewound non-inductive types. 

The protective fuse isn't helping the signal path sound any clearer either. If you don't crank on them, you should be able to bypass the fuse completely and get it out of the circuit.  All minor possible improvements that may help give those metal domes a slightly cleaner signal.  Food for thought...

At the very least, you need to know the specs on the current (old) tweeters. You may be able to look it up if it has a model # on the back of it.

Barring that, replacing a tweeter with one not specifically designed for the speaker crossover/enclosure is going to be a complete crap-shoot.

 

Get the info on the specs, specifically size, sensitivity and ohms. Call Madisound , tell them what tweeters you have, and they'll give you advice on what to replace them with. Replacing them should be just a matter of unscrewing them, popping the wires off and reversing that procedure with the new ones.