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?"

Comments

Not so good

[deque_alpha]

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.

Re:Not so good

[WildFire42]

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.

This depends. If you get a high quality repair kit, one with good adhesive and high quality foam, you might have better results. It's tedious, difficult work, and requires a steady hand. You have to get everything just so, or else it will lose it's seal after a while and the thing will disintegrate again.

I've had to do this before. Not just wanted to, but had to. On a 2K Watt Yamaha S215IV Full range. One of the woofers had gone out, and replacements weren't exactly in my budget (I actually didn't have one).

I won't debate the performance of a Yamaha speaker in a Sound Reinforcement environment (I'm not a fan of Yamaha, especially their mixers), but these weren't too bad. However, it wasn't my choice to buy them, and if I'd had my way, I'd have just bought new ones as well.

For a professional environment, when a brand new replacement driver can be >$400 (and that's just a driver, not a full box), sometimes repairing the cone can be the way to go.

But, on the other hand, you have something to be thankful for. You think cone repair is tedious and annoying? Just be thankful you don't have to repair a voice coil. It's actually not too difficult to wrap the coil (some kits out there have pre-wrapped and even special tools for wrapping coils easily and quickly), but trying to scrape melted copper off of a heavily overdriven and not very well cooled driver will make you wonder why you ever went into technical audio.

I call this the Fun/Pain Ratio

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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!

Re:No way!

[Uber Banker]

I totally agree. Speaker technology has seen little innovation in recent decades (finer points have been improved, but no 'breakthrough'), the 5.1 and 6.1 extensions are jokes, OK for games they are good but any 5/6.1 system is crap at music/DVD for your $, better spend hard earned dollars on good quality stereo speakers that _really_ do sound like gold.

OK, was making a break for OT but restrained myself. Foam sucks. If you are passinate about your speakers/sound, I recommend you check out these groups:

audio asylum
audiocircle or
TNT

Re:No luck here

[h2odragon]

ahh, but you weren't using $800/roll, audiophile duct tape, now were you.