I brought home a nice pair of early Snell K I with vifa drivers; M21WG paper woofers and D19TD. Suspension on woofer is crackling but I was able to play the pair on my 300b and sort of "asses" the sound. I like the woofers part. It has a nice tone and I really like the paper's cone feel and already ordered proper surrounds. The cheapest vifa poly dome plays clean although I'm pretty sure manufactured in 83' drivers lost all of it's ferrofluid in the gap (maybe it's good since Audio Note version is made without it for better transients). Sure,I couldn't crank up the speakers but even without it, the highs are evidently "generic" sounding , flat and "splashy". I would really like to change the tweeters but it's a sticky bit if it comes to Snell . I could buy new more or less exact vifa D19TD-05-08 which might have been improved over the years and are better sounding than 30 years ago for lunch money (~$30 a pair) I could try to improve using newer DX19TD ($60 matched pair ) which seem really more suitable to cross to 8" with it's lower 800hz fs (compared to 1700 hz d19td) I have a pair of Hiquphon OWI tweeters which I promptly popped in. They work OK (much , much more refined driver ) but are little shy at 87dB compared to 89dB vifa . I could maybe ask PQ for AN K tweeters but price would be high (south of $200 a pair probably).
Everybody knows, that the problem is matching and individual crossovers in Snell speakers. It was more relevant 30 years ago when drivers were not very consistent (my OWIs are 0.5dB apart ) . Consequently the crossover differs one from another slightly. HF filter caps measure 7.6uF and 8.9 uF and curiously one is made with parallel electrolytic caps and other with one mylar and one el cap. (same with cap across the woofer ) I don't think values drifted and ESR is rather low at 0.05 Ohm. I do not have much against el caps in crossover (Audio note use all el caps in their speakers up to $10k after all ) but would probably want consistent caps in both speakers .
My question would be. Does anybody have basic schematic of Snell (AN) K crossover with "theoretical" values around which they "tweaked " to get "master curve" right . Anybody replaced tweeter with something better and got around tuning? I don't have ARTa just yet but maybe it's a good excuse to buy calibrated mic and software and start messing around The surrounds arrive probably in 2 weeks so I have time to "ramble around
Tia, L
Everybody knows, that the problem is matching and individual crossovers in Snell speakers. It was more relevant 30 years ago when drivers were not very consistent (my OWIs are 0.5dB apart ) . Consequently the crossover differs one from another slightly. HF filter caps measure 7.6uF and 8.9 uF and curiously one is made with parallel electrolytic caps and other with one mylar and one el cap. (same with cap across the woofer ) I don't think values drifted and ESR is rather low at 0.05 Ohm. I do not have much against el caps in crossover (Audio note use all el caps in their speakers up to $10k after all ) but would probably want consistent caps in both speakers .
My question would be. Does anybody have basic schematic of Snell (AN) K crossover with "theoretical" values around which they "tweaked " to get "master curve" right . Anybody replaced tweeter with something better and got around tuning? I don't have ARTa just yet but maybe it's a good excuse to buy calibrated mic and software and start messing around The surrounds arrive probably in 2 weeks so I have time to "ramble around
Tia, L