I did a "deep dive" into this subject under a post entitled: "Thinking Inside the Box."
As a enthusiastic "modder" of decent hifi gear, our objective is not to "paint a mustache on the Mono Lisa", but rather address compromises that the manufacturer would have faced with considerations related the manufacturing efficiency, in-field service considerations, and costs. "Costs’ can also include engineering time. This is a point where you have to stop designing, and start producing.
During an audio event, I had a nice one-on-one conversation with the owner of speaker company that had just produced a highly successful speaker that was rocking the audio world. After whacking the ball over the net a few times about the stuff that goes inside, he finally said: "Yeah, I get all of that. I just don’t want to argue with my engineers over it." I arrived back home and decided to do a "what the heck?" modifcation of those speakers, installing VERY good cabling, bypassing crimp connectors, reducing cabinet resonances, etc. When they came to visit a few weeks later, I just had to fire them up vs their (highly successful and very good sounding) OEM version. They sat there, expressionless. Then after a while, paused : "Okay, yours sound better. What did you do?". My answer: "Everything your engineers told you wouldn’t make a difference."
The real question here, Mr. OP, is "what DYI tweaks can I do at home to make them sound better?" Yes, cabling MAY be one of those tweaks. But there may be others.
First, cabling:
Dealing with unknowns will give ... eh ... unknown results. I’m betting that you’ve never heard the internal cabling compared to other cables? Then, replacing that cable with one (you haven’t heard) recommended by others is, yet, another unknown. All the stars may line up and you might get wonderful results. Or, it may be technically better in some regards, but the sound may not be of your liking. As a "modder" and dealer, we had a pretty big toy box to work with. Cabling on spools laying around from $5 per foot to several hundred $$$ per foot. We auditioned these cables over many decades connected OUTSIDE the speaker boxes, so we were pretty sure what we were getting into INSIDE as well. We heard, literally, dozens of cables over the years of different designs and manufactures , and we adopted our cable design preferences. We had a 90%+ certainty that what we were replacing on the inside was going to be sonicly superior to what was provided and had a very good idea of what performance gains to expect. Again, that’s us.
That being said, you picked your speaker cables for a reason. Chances are you auditioned many cables over the years and prefer the sonics of what you have. If these are available bulk, these would be the preferred cable to use INSIDE. Ideally, you’d get a length of the OEM cables and do an A/B comparison. Not likely, but ideal. This would remove any unknowns from the cable equation. If your preferred cables are available in bulk, they may be difficult to work with. If so, you may need to "dumb it down" a bit (smaller gauge, similar, but more workable design).
I like to take a best bang for the buck approach to speaker upgrades. You may obtain some obvious sonic improvements from doing some simple things FIRST:
- bypass EVERY crimp, spade, screw down terminal, and push-on connector and replace with direct silver solder directly to the posts. This is (usually) an easy DYI. Those crimp on connectors and terminal strips create another switch/relay point and are usually made of production-grade (cheap) materials.
- IF the horn body is not dampened, put Dynamat (or, equiviant) on the back side. This will dramaticaly change the focus, detail, and reduce the coloration of the horn driver.
- upgrade cablling
- replace crappy OEM crossover parts (if they exist).
Hope this was helpful?
