Hi Fellow Thiel Lovers,
Haven't been on here for a while, but I have been following the thread every Friday when the weekly email arrives from Audiogon. This is a wonderful chain of discussion with like minded audio folk. Great stuff.
Anyway I just wanted to update you all on how I fixed one of my 3.5 mid ranges after it had developed a slight tear in the outer cone rib.
Of course the first thing to say that, as peerless as Jim was as a speaker designer, those tiny mid-ranges in the 3.5 are really vulnerable to breaking in some way. They undergo quite a lot of stress in that otherwise stunning design.
I was listening at reasonably high volume, although nothing at all excessive, when I heard the dreaded rasping sound out of the right channel.
Next morning I composed an email to Rob asking him how much for the rebuild. Reply came back straight away, typical Rob of course, that it would be $300 plus shipping per driver. Now that isn't too out of the way, in the scheme of things, but I figured I'd like to get both mid ranges done simultaneously, taking me somewhere North of $600 of course.
So, I thought, what if I could effect a decent repair job, while I saved up to get both drivers done later in the year/early next?
I then remembered that I had refoamed some old Infinity 625's I keep for general use around the home and how brilliantly Aleene's Tacky Glue gel had worked in giving me superb adhesion at the foam edge/cone interface.
So, I fetched a tiny paintbrush and carefully applied the Aleene's to the pretty small fissure in the 3.5 mid.
Well, what can I say, it has completely solved the issue and I've done tests with my most bass heavy tracks, y'know the Kraftwerks, the Jamiroquais etc., and everything is back to being absolutely perfect and rock solid.
So I just wanted to pass this on, not as a way of depriving Rob of service work, but as a great way of giving the mid-ranges a bit more stay of execution before they have to be shipped to Kentucky when the piggy bank allows.
Aleene's is a pretty well known speaker adhesive solution and appears just perfect for those paper cones on the 3.5 mids. At around $3.50 for a bottle of the stuff, it's worth having some around for such eventualities. It's incredibly flexible and doesn't seem to react badly to any surface.
Available at Ace Hardware, Walmart etc.
Hope this is useful info for you 3.5 owners.
