Is it good to upgrade the crossovers in your speakers?

I have $2300 worth of parts on order now for crossover upgrades. Obviously I’m a believer. I also obviously disagree with @czarivey . But it depends on what speakers you have and what their capability is. You don’t want to spend a lot of money on an upgrade to a speaker with poor drivers, for example.

@sns said it well:  As long as you're not changing values of components you're not going to change voicing to a huge degree. And the best quality parts are only going to improve timbre, natural sound quality.

--Jerry

@artemus_5  As mentioned above 20 year old capacitors getting long in tooth, should probably replace. As far as I'm concerned electrolytics don't belong in speaker crossovers, the issue is whether film caps will fit, large values mean less likely. Now, I"ve heard very good things about the VH Audio ODAM,  not as costly as others and relatively smaller size.  Sonic caps are much lower price alternative to the caps I spoke about in previous post.

I'll relate an interesting interaction I had with Bobby Palkovich (RIP) many years ago. Bobby's life work was development of his Merlin line of speakers, constant refinement of original design. Well, naivety lead me to call various manufacturers, designers in those days to report on various mods/substitutions of parts I made to their equipment. So one day I decide to call Bobby and report on Duelund cap mod I had done to my Merlin VSM-MM bam module and internal speaker crossover. Bobby was not too happy with me ( as were other manufacturers I contacted in those days), but showed some interest in spite of this negativity. Lo and behold, perhaps a year later Bobby was offering the Duelund upgrades to his beloved Merlins. It is to Bobby's credit he was open minded enough to hear me through and try my mods on his design.  Bobby was already aware of boutique caps prior to my conversation as  he was usiing Hovlands at that time, he discovered, as I had the Duelund VSF were an improvement. Many OEM's not as open minded, parts are parts to them, they'll try to convince you the same.

I've upgraded crossovers on a dozen pairs of speakers.  Never spent more than $200 total for caps and wiring, sometimes Mortite packing.  The $200 went into a pair of Epos 14.  Every speaker was a success and fun to do.  Never changed any of the cap values.

The experts above don’t even mention insertion values they say you are fine as long as you use the same values but those same values have different levels of insertion loss. This is a reason upgraders hear differences since insertion loss can change the output levels of your transducers. In my opinion, most modding networks really don’t understand what they are doing. And tend to consider cost more than anything else when selecting parts used in the upgrade. Lots of confirmation bias involved in crossover mods as those who don’t understand but spent much and did a thing now hear an amazing difference mostly described as an improvement you don’t hear them saying what they ever did was not as good as stock its always better since they spent much and did a thing. I see most not comparing upgraded networks to stock networks. These are all newbie mistakes but I do know you all will still do it because logic is not involved. And of course, it will sound amazing right? like the guy above {Every speaker was a success and fun to do} really every? hmm