I just typed a very long post and lost it
OK, here we go again. This is my first post here. I heard about this forum over at the Klipsch forums. My first real speakers were JBL L60T's that I bought new in 1989 and just sold last year. I really wanted L100T's but could not afford them back then. As luck would have it, I just picked up a mint set of them about a week ago.
When I grew up, L250's and K Horns were the Holy Grail of speakers (and the L100's and various studio monitors when I was a kid). K Horns appeared for sale locally several years ago and I bought them and went in that direction. I now have K Horns, Belles, and Heresys for horns, as well as some small Maggies and the JBL's.
I am a 2 channel guy and have my K Horns tri-amped using an active crossover. I am finalizing a deal to sell the K Horns and I am getting ready to assemble my lasest project, consisting of factory built Speakerlab K Horn bass bin clones, JBL 2470 compression drivers monted on Altec 511B's and JBL 2404 "Baby Cheeks." Its funny how us Klipsch guys eventualy seem to all use JBL and Altec drivers and horns (and Edgar designed horns too).
Anyway, I have built ALK crossovers for my K Horns using Solen and Hovland caps before. Klipsch speakers always see a major improvement when the old caps are replaced or the old crossovers are replaced with a new design using fresh caps.
I am having my woofers re-foamed and took the speakers apart to put on a fresh coat of linseed oil. While I have them apart I want to rebuild the crossovers.
My L100T's crossovers have what look like large value (14, 17 and 40 uF) electrolytics bypassed with very small tear drop caps (0.1 uF) and anemic looking inductors. Typical stuff for production crossovers. Solen makes some very nice solid core and Litz inductors but I don't want to spend that much here.
I do think that replacing the caps with some new Solens should help the speakers. Because they are poly caps they should not need to be bypassed.
Solen makes 3.0 uF, 13 uF, 16 uF and 39 uF caps so it looks like I will need to bypass everything but the 3.0 with 1.0 uF's. The Solen's are going to be much larger, but I can just mount them on another board with jumper wires if necesary.
I know that the Solen's are good caps for the price and they are rather forward too. This is not a problem with horns because if set up properly, everyhting in the signal path has been picked with horns in mind so no harshness is present.
My concern here is that I am using the L100T's in an exercise room with an old Denon receiver (same one I bougth in 1989 and drove the L60T's with). Not exactly a great source, but the JBL's are much more forgiving than horns and have a nice mellow sound.
Has anyone here used Solens with these speakers? How are the results? I want to see an improvement if I do this.
Are their any new DIY crossover designs that I should be considering. This is for an exercise room so I do not need the ultimate, just good sound.
What do you guys think?
Thanks,
Chris