Brass screws make a real difference on Dunlavy s ?

Wait a minute...are you guys talking about re-tightening screws that were loose? Which would be like proclaiming that your car is less jumpy because you replaced the broken motor mounts...well, yeah, duh. Or are you saying that you're actually hearing better sound by over-tightening screws that are already properly seated, and you're tightening them beyond what the manufacturer's quality specs dictated?

If it's the former, nobody gets a trophy for discovering they get better sound if the drivers aren't about to fall out of the cabinet and crash to the floor. But I'm sure nobody would debate that...sorta goes without saying.

If it's the latter...are we to conclude that these speaker designers - keeping in mind that you guys aren't talking about white fan specials, but well-designed products from highly-respected manufacturers - put all that time into creating these fine products but only half-assed it when it came time to attach the drivers, and they'd have actually created better products if only they'd taken a minute and turned their screws a little further?

Have to be candid here...I can't read this thread without repeatedly checking the calendar to make sure it's not April 1.

Brauser, the skepticism you likely read in my post comes from the perspective that what you're doing isn't tweaking (or incorporating a minor change, as you put it), any more than inflating car's tires back to spec means you're tweaking that model's gas mileage potential, or fixing a hole in your roof is tweaking a house's weather sealability. All of these things, like tightening those screws that you found needed two full rotations, is simply bringing the item back up to spec (again, assuming that specification for any speaker doesn't include loose drivers). I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, I'm saying that re-tightening loose screws, at least in my personal estimation, isn't a case of finding new improvements in a system, it's simply a case of returning a system to the level you should have been enjoying all along if the screws weren't loose.

The upside of course is that maybe this thread will remind everyone to check your screws, in case the manufacturer did a poor job of securing the drivers and you never noticed before. So, screw away!

No Brauser, I'm saying that if you're really experiencing a case of discovering a level of tightening that was either beyond the engineering capability of your speakers' designer, or simply wasn't important enough a quality control concern for the designer to care about, then you bought the wrong speakers. Think about it...what exactly does "better than new" mean? If we can agree that every screw can be tightened to a maximum torque level and perfect seating, either the speaker manufacturer assembled the speakers to specification, or they didn't. And again, if the difference between good sound and better sound is two turns of a screw, what does that say about the speaker designer if they missed that detail when designing and building the speakers? Focusing on "splitting hairs" is missing the point entirely. If you don't see this, then we might as well start a thread about how if we tighten the lug nuts on our car wheels to "better than new" the car will ride better.