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Repairing Speaker Foam Surrounds?

Posted by Cliff on from the if-it's-broke-fix-it dept.

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?"

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Not so good by deque_alpha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not so good by WildFire42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.