ISO 'vintage' Philips dome tweeter

(I thought I posted this yesterday, but couldn't find it... if so, please excuse the repost)

I am not a regular here, but I thought this might be a good place to pose this question. I have an old pair of mid/late 1970's AVID 102 2-way sealed box speakers. One of the two speakers has a "treble deficit", which I have traced to the tweeter (not the crossover). I find it odd that a tweeter could have reduced output (i.e., rather than simply have an open voicecoil and no output), but that seems to be the case!

The tweeter in question is a Philips soft dome unit. The numbers on the tweeter were:

AD 0160 T8
2422 257 33102
DD 02 724 43
Philips

Does anyone know anything about this tweeter?

or

Is it still available?

or

Can anyone suggest a reasonable replacement?

Thanks very much for your attention.

all the best,
mrh

Well I can tell you the Philips tweeter is no longer available. I replaced the Philips tweeters in my Dahlquist DQ-10's with Audax tweets. Go to madisound.com and they can sell you a suitable replacement at a reasonable price. I believe I paid about $45 for a pair of Audax and I can't hear the difference from the originals. Or you keep scanning ebay and I'm sure they'll show up eventuallyl. However I doubt you get'em cheap.

Mike

Hi MRH;

Well I don't have any tweeter replacement suggestion for you but did want to tell you that I have the same speakers here burnin' in. I picked them up at a thrift store last friday. I have been pretty impressed with there performance so far.

Mine too had one tweeter misfiring but I traced that down to a intermittent fuse holder contact. Seems the fuse is only for the tweeter, the woofer still woofs even with fuse out.

Are you sure the tweeter is bad? being protected with the fuse there might also be a bad contact or wire in the tweeter 3 way switch or the fuse holder. A quick tweeter pull and check for continuity with an ohm meter should confirm if the tweeter is blown or not. You could also swap tweeters between the two speakers and see if the problem moves with the tweeter or not.

I'm sure you can find a replacement from the source mentioned above if needed, however you might have to get two to maintain a proper level match for the two speakers. I've found tweeters on e-bay pretty cheap if you know what your after.

Anyway good luck and keep up posted.

LEfty

Lefty:

Thanks for the suggestion: I had sincerely hoped that I might have a problem such as what you describe, which is why I finally spent a block of time last Monday swapping and bypassing components to see where the problem really lay. There's no doubt that it's the driver itself. I even tried bypassing the wires from the xo to the tweeter, in case there were a high-resistance connection somewhere.

The Avid speakers were indeed good sounding speakers in the late-70's "pseudo-British-monitor" idiom that I grew up with. I paid $10 for this pair, and the other speaker is perfect, so it'd be fun to get them up to snuff again. Contrary to some opinions, I find these tweeters (working right) to be smooth and extended (not at all spitty).

I may try replacing (both) Philips AD 0160 T8's with AD 0163 T8's.
Interestingly there's a pair of Avid 102's on eBAY right this second that appear to have had AD 0163 T8's installed in 'em!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1379097312

MRH;

Very nice pictures that seller has for his Avid speaker listing. Not sure he will get his asking price as it seems too high to me for a 10" 2-way. Dyanco's A-25 are a highly respected speaker of the same size and design and they seem to sell around $100 or so the last time I looked. I also own a pair of the A-25s. Do you know what the original retail price on these speakers were? Mine have a 1980 date on the rear manufacture data sheet which seems later then some have given for this model.

I went ahead a pulled one of my tweeters on the Avid and found the following part number:

AD 0163 T8

So apparently the manufacture did seem to use slightly different tweeter model numbers during it's manufacture run.

I went ahead and looked at the woofer and crossover numbers:

Woofer DR 116
X-over A-CH-224 REV. F.

Don't know the sensitivity rating for these speakers but the SX-650 rated at 35wpc that I found the same day can play them increadibly loud with a very balanced sounding frequency response, the tweeter really work on this model that's for sure.

I thought normally sealed acustic suspension type speakers were noted for requiring a lot of watts to get rockin'. Would you know the power specs on this speaker also?


Lefty

Hey I might have a lead to two of these tweeters

I gave a pair of those tweets to a friend for a project, he may still have em. E-mail me and I will give the details.

Peter Beka