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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: rebuild crossover in B&W 602S2's posted by Jadde on July 24, 2000 at 23:31:34:
Jadde,Here goes:
#1. Absolutely! You may discover your speakers are better than you thought possible.
#2. Tough question. I've reworked sev. diff. speakers, the first time doing it piecemeal and the others as complete rebuilds. The piecemeal conversion did show incremental improvements but it's difficult to say just which items would give the greatest single improvemnt on their own.
CAPS: prob. the #1 change. Use good polyprops and add high quality film/foil bypass caps (they do make a real diff.) This is an easy swap out conversion.
RESISTORS: this is a gray area (IMO) the cheap sand cast resistors gen. used aren't much good, but how much $$$ do you want to spend on resistors? I went for decent quality 2-5 W, non-inductive, wirewound 1% resistors. A buck or two a pop seems reasonible, $5-10 each seems a waste.
INDUCTORS: Changing these over is tricky. If the XO is well thought-out and designed, the DC resistence of the coil is taken into account in the overall transfer fuction of the XO. So, if you simply substitute a larger (or smaller) gauge coil for the original, w/o taking into account the DCR you may alter the system response (and not to your liking). I'm not familiar w/ the B&W 602 XO so I do not know what quality level the coils are. Air cores are the preferred inductor, bar none. The foil types (Solo, Goertz, etc) are excellent but $$$. Solen, Interteknic, and Madisound all supply very good quality air core inducts. Next (on my list anyway) are laminated core inductors (best for larger values over 2 mH) Then your run-of-the-mill por core inductors are at the bottom of the list.
WIRING: Rewiring the speaker makes sense, since you're pulling apart the XO anyway. I've always rewired all my systems and the others I've rebuilt. I chose wire based on budget (both mine and the owners) and what was availible. Good 16 ga. wire works well for tweets and mids. 14 ga. has less resistence (but how much diff. can you measure in a 3' length?) 12 ga. makes sense for the woofer. I always added 6-12" of wire, just to make pulling the drivers out at a later time easier. (It's amazing how stingy some mfgs get w/ even simple 18 ga. zip cord!)
#3. You can make the conversion as simple as just replacing the caps. Or you can go full-zoot route; completely separate XO sections (ie: woofer LP, tweeter HP, etc) go to biwire, and even move the XO to an external housing. I reworked one system 3 times, over a lengthy period, gaining clarity, bass extension and staging at each stage. Since I (and most everyone else) work on a limited budget, I tend to keep in perspective the objective of "is it worth spending twice what I paid for these speakers in XO parts?" I've spent as little as $10 to rewire an inexpensive bookshelf system and over $100 for a total rework of large floorstanding two-way speakers.
Hope you find this useful.
PS
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Follow Ups
- Re: rebuild crossover in B&W 602S2's - PeterS 06:06:33 07/25/00 (2)
- thanks - Jadde 23:05:11 07/25/00 (0)
- I'll second that nt - Lukasz F. 15:42:07 07/25/00 (0)
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