"Have you ever upgraded coupling caps? If you know, you know.
It’s part of the hobby for me. Sorry if that bothers you."
Sounds like fun. I think some fail to realize that even the most brilliant designers/manufacturers have retained a bit of intellectual humility and recognize that their knowledge base is incomplete. There is always something new to discover. Secondly, in any commercial venture there is a finite amount of time and resources you can assign to a project before you have to take the D&E exit and go into production. Why not $10k a pair? Because "under $4k" would attract a lot more customers, and (arguably) provide more bang for the buck. So, you do what you have to do to hit a price point.
We may have just been introduced to an instant Hi-Fi classic, the best under $5k speaker ever produced. That being said, it doesn’t mean that with a little TLC, it can’t be improved. Or, have a blast as a speaker geek tossing parts around.
fyi- A while back I took a pair of AJ’s designed Pioneer SB-L22s apart and upgraded the crossovers to see how much music you can get out of a (at the time) $150 pair of speakers. Surprising. I also performed some serious upgrades to one of the most commercially and sonically successful speakers in recent memory, auditioned the finished product to the manufacturer and had some influence on their future "flagship" models. Even "classics" can be improved.
So, any first-hand experience with balanced/floating crossover designs?
I have diy’d several speakers and subs in years past. You could do that on simpler designs with no issues. Andrew Jones and his bottom end budget speakers (where he was literally given a 40 dollar budget to work with), for example....yeah, you can do some diy upgrades. Nevertheless, even Danny Richie got put in his place years ago by AJ on that lil budget Pioneer speaker. I’ll share that back n forth discussion, if i can find it.
On his 5k and above type of speakers where the dude had a decent budget to work with, especially the Elac Adante series, which i own...No, i wouldn’t touch that coupled cavity design of his. When that dude went into depth on how he modeled it, etc, etc before he even started to spec or dev any hardware, i was humbled. It ain’t all that simple as changing out a stupid li’l cap. But, then again, every forum guy around here is a freak genius diy expert in his own head.
On certain 20k, 30k, etc, clown car speakers designed by some "high end" dude, sure, no problem, upgrade away, fix the crap.