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Repairing Speaker Foam Surrounds?
bigmush asks: "I have an old pair of speakers, and they had been working fine until recently. I took off the covers, and saw that the foam surround had started to wear out on both of the woofers. After 15 years of service, this was a sad discovery (though also an opportunity to justify an upgrade!). I found a few foam surround repair kits available online. How well do these work? What experiences have you had with them?"
I haven't used the specific ones you found, but tried a very similar product for repairing a set of tried and true loudspeakers I used to own that suffered a similar failure. Bottom line, don't waste your time, just get some new speakers. It seemed to work well enough at first, but after only a few months of my listening habits, they were shot again. But as usual, YMMV.
A decent pair of speakers can really live this long and keep being great. A quality stereo pair bought 15 years ago will still whoop any standard 5.1 or 6.1 system of today thrown at them (I have a SoA and Thoebe pumping out quality through 15 year old speaskers right now).
I don't recommend new foam in itself, but if the shell/stand of your speaker is still good you can replace the whole 'insides' at a reasonable cost and keep what makes your speaker more than good.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
This is a Ratio of what I get out of something as to what I put into it.
Your fun would be that you have your speakers back, you have spent a couple of bucks on it to bring back to life old ass speakers.
Fun = 5 on a scale of 1 to 10
Pain, is you have to do it. It might not come out as planned. You have old ass speakers you have now sunk more money into.
Pain in your ass = 6
If your p > f just buck up and do what is more fun. IE- buy some new speakers.
In this case if you don't have the money, and it would cause you to not eat for a week. Well then the F/P Raito is scewed.
Your fun just went up, it is always fun to eat.
F = 6
P = 5
f > P = Fix the damn things, food is more important.
Figure out what your f/p ratio is. This is a life lesson. The f/p ratio is what keeps me sane.
Just recently I had a f/p ratio for going surfing.
3 foot, semi glassy surf. Fun = 7
58f water temp, cloudy, hole in wetsuit. Pain = 7.5
Had I been 23 again, the pain raito would have been about 5.5. Thus I would have hit the waves, as it is now...screw it. I am going to get a game of WarcraftIII in with beer and wait for the florida sun to heat up the water a bit.
Live by the f/p ratio!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Surround repair kits are cheap and work very well. If the drivers are generic junk, then it might not be worth the effort, unless you're really poor. If the drivers are good, like Bose or something, then it's definately worth it.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
A speaker's sound reproduction characteristics are defined by the motor strength (magnet), compliance (bounciness of the surround and spider), and moving mass. Change one of these things, and you've just changed the overall compliance of the speaker (the "Q", in audiophile-speak). If you change the "Q" for high-frequency and midrange drivers, the effects may be minimal, because drastically changing their "Q" is more difficult". Low frequency drivers are another matter, and a great deal of design work goes into pairing the driver, enclosure, and port length to get a particular response curve. If you can find out from the manufacturer whether the surrounds will work well, you might be able to keep the speakers around for a while, and have them sound as good as new...otherwise, it's a crap shoot. Also remember that you're going to need a fairly robust adhesive to make the things stick for more than 20 minutes, and speaker basket and cone sizes can vary widely for "standard" sizes...especially for major name brand manufacturers. Overall, it's probably going to be best for you to retire you 15-year-old gear, and start shopping for a new pair that will last that long, but it wouldn't hurt to try to fix your current ones while you look.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Oh yeah and next time, buy drivers with rubber surrounds.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
simplyspeakers.com has great product and reasonable prices. I ordered from them a couple of times and service has always been excellent.
Of course, this all makes sense only if the speakers were actually high quality in the first place. If they use cheap generic drivers, you might want to just replace the drivers entirely. Of course, you have to be careful to not ruin the voicing of the speaker.
I own a set of 15 year old Mission speakers. Damn nice sounding they are too. One of the drivers got damaged when a friend drunkenly fell into it.
:)
Rather than mess about trying to repair it myself I posted the driver off to Mission to see what they could do. Unfortunately for me, they couldn't recone it but they could supply me with an equivelant replacement driver.
60 later and I'd repaired the speaker. Hopefully I'll get another 15 years out of them.
Many decent speaker manufacturers offer a recone service. If not they'll more than likely offer a replacement driver. Give it a shot!
Oh yeah and next time, buy drivers with rubber surrounds.
Actually, that depends on who you talk to. Foam tends to have a much better response, but rubber is much more durable. There are pros and cons to each. Foam won't decrease the "punch" a driver has, as it's good to have a relatively flexible edge. Of course, if the speaker needs to be rugged (for instance, if you're in outdoor, dirty/dusty, or travelling environments), or you're not in a professional environment, rubber surrounds are the way to go.
But it all depends on the application.
Try these guys out: PE
You can find foam surround replacement kits, or you can search for some drivers that fit specific parameters to replace your bad ones. Either way, I'm sure you'll find something in a decent price range.
BAM!
In many cases there are other issues with the speaker as well that make it worthwhile to have the speaker looked at by somebody with experience at this sort of thing.
I have dealt with these guys with a great deal of success.
http://layneaudio.hypermart.net/repair.htm
Not cheap, but if you have good speakers they are usually worth repairing. The owner is a real geek about this sort of stuff too, so you are getting somebody who has some real knowledge.
I used a kit such as these about 10 years ago on a set of old JBLs and even now they still work great.
I should hope that the speakers sound different, as speakers with busted up surrounds sound like crap. As for whether they sound the same as when they were new, that's a different story.
At the time it was worth it for me as I didn't have enough money to replace the speakers, as always YMMV.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.