Replacing my tweeters a good idea?

Trelja...I couldn't have said it better. Bryhifi...I spent two grand on power tools, bought 3 or 4 20 foot sections of PVC water pipe, and built a pretty cool cylindrical 3-way using SEAS 5 mid and 0.75 plastic dome, with Peerless 8 down-firing woofer. I had built a similar cylindrical speaker as a kid using 3 foot clay sewer pipes, mounting a coaxial Jensen or Utah (remember them?) driver upward-firing into a plaster-filled kitchen funnel for 360 dispersion. What a hoot! So I decided to revisit that idea with modern materials. Well, no-one seemed excited about a cylindrical shape, so I never built the second side. Sound was pretty good, although woofer/mid crossover was problematic. Got good at voicing crossovers, and noticed that I could hear 1/3 dB changes over 1.5 octaves in the upper crossover region. After seeing that raw driver sensitivity tolerances are typically +/- 5-10 times that level I quickly realized that it would be impossible to make speaker systems consistently without customizing each crossover, or spending a fortune to get tight-tolerance drivers. I built with others 20 pair of a nice 6.5/1 two-way a few years back that ALMOST got into production as a reinforcement system for a digital piano mnaufacturer. A local high-end dealer liked them A LOT, but we couldn't get the cabinet maker to take a repeat order at a reasonable price. Voicing a matched-pair of speakers is a labor of love, and I have great appreciation for those who do it well. I preferred these two-ways to many commercial designs for a long time, but after I heard what Bruno Pelchat et al at Verity Audio accomplished with their Parsifal Encores, in my living room, my jaw dropped! Had to have 'em! So I'm done...for now. (PS. Want a good deal on Seas 5" 'bullet' dustcap, or those tweeters? How about the Peerless CC line 8"? A nice router...or maybe a belt-sander? Oh well, it was fun. It's all about the process, anyway, right?) Shabbado...you mean "low-pass", and no, that's NOT what you want to do. Room treatment, upstream components, maybe 1-2 ohms on the tweeter: try 'em all, and have fun!

Just splice the resistor into one of the leads to the tweeter; positive or negative won't matter. You could use an 8 ohm pot temporarily to get the exact value you like, then buy a fixed resistor of that value. If you still can't get it right I'll sell you my nice pair of 19mm Seas plastic-dome tweeters cheap. (I'm through with speaker building!) Good Luck.

Shabbaddoo (sp?). Got an extra pair of 2 ohm resistors I'll mail ya for free. If the treble drops a little too much just use them both in parallel to get 1 ohm, and then buy another one at Radio Shack. Send me your address, and I'll pop 'em in the mail. Happy Thanksgiving!

Let's not overcomplicate this, guys....SPECIFICALLY: adding a small resistance in series with the tweeter will possibly slightly RAISE the system's crossover frequency, which would allow the tweeter to run even further away from its primary resonance. That fact, plus its lowered sensitivity via the added 1-2 ohms, should protect it rather than endanger it or the system, no? The effect upon system total impedence would likewise be sufficiently small enough to ignore. "Padding" the tweeter in this way is a whole lot more predictable than round after round of cable experiments, and a lot quicker. I don't mean to step on any toes, either, but padding a tweeter lightly IS a relatively easy, simple thing to try. Isn't this why some manufacturers provide switched tweeter levels via in-line resistors as part of their designs?...Let's let the thread-head have his fun, and get the benefits of a more pleasing spectral balance, eh? He's probably not gonna blow up his speaker, nor destroy its response. Cheers.