Polk Monitor 5 tweeters suck
- Thread starter djnagle
- Start date
What I find interesting is the smoldering flame war over which is better the Peerless Tweeter, or the RDO-194. That fact there is such a controversy is an illustration of just how good the RDO-194 is.
Dswankey
Lunatic Member
Glad to hear you are keeping them and refinishing them. There are some great threads over at CP about veneer work. Here's one (click on the jpeg links to see the pics)
http://forum.polkaudio.com/discussion/98531/monitor-5bs-given-a-refurb-upgrade-w-pics/p1
Interesting he used Solen capacitors. Parts Connexion has the Axon Tru Cap’s which are considered my some as being better. I used a pair on the original 10B crossover. The only drawback is their size, making them interesting to mount. But they are good and cheap. This is one of the things that makes Mundorf E-Cap’s shine their size.
https://www.partsconnexion.com/axon-true-cap-film-capacitors.html
https://www.partsconnexion.com/axon-true-cap-film-capacitors.html
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Here is the Schematic for the Monitor 5B. This one has the polyfuse, a temperature variable resistor the hotter it gets the higher it’s resistance. The real speaker killer is a shot of DC from blasted PA’s the polyfuse does not react fast enough to save anything. Get rid of this blue rat turd. The nominal resistance of the Polyfuse is .5Ω Replace the 2.0Ω resistor with a 2.5Ω 12 Watt Vishay Mills. Sonic Craft has everything you will need.
Polk was well aware of the 12,000 hz resonance peak.
Most soft dome tweeters of the day exhibited this "problem".
Today soft dome tweeters have come back into favor as companies like Scan-Speak have addressed the issue .
From the Art of Speaker Design:
"Over the last ten years, the soft-domes have made a surprising comeback with the gradual improvement to the Scan-Speak D2905 series of 1" tweeters, which compete on even terms with any metal-dome around. These tweeters combine vented pole-pieces with sophisticated transmission-line back-loading, new dome profiles, and new coating materials. As a result, they have the sonic resolution and detail of the best metal domes without the characteristic 22 to 27 kHz metal resonance."
darkblue94
The Devil made me do it.
Word on the street is that the RDO-198 is even better though it does require a modification to the crossover (AKA the TL mod.)
Reading about the “TL” mod’ and it would seem with my latest rebuild I was mostly there I only needed to replace the board mounted inductor.
Fomoco1649
Active Member
Hi... wondering if upgrading to RDO - 194 tweets will be noticeable difference...
F1nut
Super Member
The RD0194-1 is indeed.
