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EPI woofer replacement?

Hey Nat, thanks so much for the reply! Wow, I was really wondering if anyone would still check this forum..

They said the voice coil is fried and the speaker is completely blown.

Yeah, diminishing the value of the original EPI's would be a bummer; I totally respect the collector aspect of things, which is why I love vintage gear & equipment myself. I also think a lot of older gear sounds better & feels better. This is what I'm torn over...putting new woofers in, as the extensive research I've been doing on EPI's on this site and elsewhere seems to suggest the sound will for sure vary if new woofers are put in as there's this synergy between the woofer and tweeter of the EPI - which totally makes sense. Your response is very helpful though as it suggests a range of possibility. It seems to keep them original would require more money & time, as the human speakers gentleman seems to be somewhat slow from what I've read. For $59 for the replacement of both woofers and parts/labor, it seems like a reasonable price in my mind. In doing this I fully will have to accept that they are no longer a pair of EPI's, which is something I can do; I just don't really want them to sound way shittier. I suppose I have to accept that that could be a possibility also.
 
That's not a bad price -- see if they will recap the cross over with a film cap while they are in there. It's possible to mytholgize EPIs too much. They were a very good compromise between sound quality and price at the time, and good sounding speakers continue to sound good even if the state of the art progresses (which maybe it has, a bit). So it's reasonable both to want to stay close to the original voicing but also not tie yourself in knots about replacing something broken with something different.
I'm surprised, though that the shop didn't offer to track down a used EPI woofer -- they aren't hard to find at reasonable prices.
 
I bought one single EPI 100V for $14.95, at a Goodwill.....I needed the tweeter for another pair of 100's. The woofer was not original....someone installed a "Mint" Rockford Fostgate 8" woofer...valued at $160 new!! I sold it to a relative that hounded me for it ...for $40...
 
I have a few sets of epi and would never "substitute" any woofer and be happy with it. The beauty is in the module. Spend the 48$ and you will be set.
One reason the epi s are still around for me is that they do many things very well such as smoothness and deep bass, very clean bass without being there when it's not asked for. So if that was lost which could happen with a replacement,
than I wouldn't keep the speaker around for nostalgia.
 
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It's hard for me to believe that anyone would have to even think about spending 48 bucks to repair a set of EPI 100s. Do you have any idea what it would cost you to go out and buy a pair of new speakers that would provide you with the performance of the 100s? You would be in the $500 to $800 range. The B&W 685 S2s come to mind right off. Although they don't have quite the bass response of the 100s. They're $700 for the pair. Kind of makes $48 seem pale by comparison, doesn't it?

If you're trying to save money there are a lot of cheap, crappy speakers out there that would fit the bill. Replace the woofers in the 100s with these aftermarkets of 'similar specs' and you'll have just that....a pair of cheap, crappy speakers And they're certainly not going to provide the performance and enjoyment that the 100s will.

CopperWizard has said something above that is quite profound: "The beauty is in the module". This is exactly correct. The way the original woofer and tweeter interact is what makes the EPIs.
 
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Probably kind of a shameless plug here, but Huw at Human Speakers sells a direct replacement for the EPI woofer and/or tweeter. I am using a pair of his PRO-001 woofers in my EPI 200C speakers and they sound fantastic. I plan on getting a second pair for a pair of 100W's I have that have "like-kind" replacement woofers.
 
ethangsmith said:
Probably kind of a shameless plug here, but Huw at Human Speakers sells a direct replacement for the EPI woofer and/or tweeter. I am using a pair of his PRO-001 woofers in my EPI 200C speakers and they sound fantastic. I plan on getting a second pair for a pair of 100W's I have that have "like-kind" replacement woofers.
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It's not a shameless plug at all. It's a fact. Huw makes excellent, direct replacement drivers for EPI and Genesis. For all intents, those companies are still in business because of Huw Powell.
 
I like these positive EPI-100 stories - makes me feel better about dropping $80.00 on a pair of re-foamed 100Vs in their original boxes.
 
Recapping is easy. My wife and I did 3 pairs of EPI's in one afternoon without any troubles. I used the 1% 10uf Dayton caps from Parts Express with the .01uf Audiocap bypass caps. Treble became even more smooth and "airy" sounding. Worth the few bucks while you're inside there rummaging around.
 
I've used the 1% Daytons since trying them, many pairs ago. For a bypass cap, I use the Dayton Film & Foil bypass caps, same .01uf. I used to use the 5% Daytons, but I was shy of the dollar value for free shipping, on an order, long ago, so I upgraded to get to the threshold, and haven't looked back. The few extra dollars are well worth it, to my ears.
 
I like EPIs, and have since the early 70s. But I don' think that they are so superlative that they justify putting unlimited amounts of money into them (and I'm not claiming that anyone else is saying this either). There are a lot of EPIs, Epicures, Genesis, Burhoes, Fred Locke Stereo (FLS), and Reynolds Advances out there, and regardless of whatever excellence the module posses, the supply is probably sufficient to meet demand without high prices.
The EPI module was, and is, a very nice solution to the problem of high quality sound at low prices, but it was never an assault on the state of the art, and overpraising it isn't doing it any favors. The 100s were very strong competitors in the market in the 70s, and the higher end multiple module models were respectable in their niches, but it's confusing categories to compare them dollar to dollar with new speakers -- of course the new speakers list for much more, but that includes adjusting for inflation, fresh from the factory condition (and modern aesthetics, which may be a mixed blessing), a warrantee, no need to refurbish, refoam, recap, possibly even dealer support, and that's also before any discount. All those factors matter to most people, for whom the buyer beware aspect of used equipment is offputting.
All of which boils down to saying that even if the EPIs have been actually compared with the B&Ws mentioned (and I don't doubt that they have been by the poster), to say that the EPIs sound better, therefore it's potentially worth spending up to 700 bucks on a pair of 100s is baffling. Though I'd be very happy to be in contact with those wishing to pay that much..
 
Nat said:
I like EPIs, and have since the early 70s. But I don' think that they are so superlative that they justify putting unlimited amounts of money into them (and I'm not claiming that anyone else is saying this either). There are a lot of EPIs, Epicures, Genesis, Burhoes, Fred Locke Stereo (FLS), and Reynolds Advances out there, and regardless of whatever excellence the module posses, the supply is probably sufficient to meet demand without high prices.
The EPI module was, and is, a very nice solution to the problem of high quality sound at low prices, but it was never an assault on the state of the art, and overpraising it isn't doing it any favors. The 100s were very strong competitors in the market in the 70s, and the higher end multiple module models were respectable in their niches, but it's confusing categories to compare them dollar to dollar with new speakers -- of course the new speakers list for much more, but that includes adjusting for inflation, fresh from the factory condition (and modern aesthetics, which may be a mixed blessing), a warrantee, no need to refurbish, refoam, recap, possibly even dealer support, and that's also before any discount. All those factors matter to most people, for whom the buyer beware aspect of used equipment is offputting.
All of which boils down to saying that even if the EPIs have been actually compared with the B&Ws mentioned (and I don't doubt that they have been by the poster), to say that the EPIs sound better, therefore it's potentially worth spending up to 700 bucks on a pair of 100s is baffling. Though I'd be very happy to be in contact with those wishing to pay that much..
Click to expand...

Please indicate to me where I said, or even intimated, that " it's potentially worth spending up to 700 bucks on a pair of 100s". Please show me as well where I said that the EPIs 'sound better'. Your post is somewhat rambling with no clear point so it's possible that you didn't understand mine. So I will try to clarify....I said: "Do you have any idea what it would cost you to go out and buy a pair of new speakers that would provide you with the performance of the 100s?" Which means that if you were to go out in today's market and shop for a linear, low distortion speaker with a response curve similar to the EPI 100, that is flat within 3 db from 45 to 18khz, you would have to spend between $500 to $800. I used the B&W 685s, which sell for about $700, as an example as the response curve and general performance is close to the EPI 100, although the B&Ws don't go quite as deep. Maybe this will clarify things for you.
 
I thought I was clearer than apparently I actually was. What I meant to say was that I don't think it's particularly useful to use modern speaker prices as a guide to how much it's worth putting into repairing/restoring a speaker. A much more helpful and obvious standard of comparison is the going rate for a working pair of the same speakers (even though there is wide variation in pricing of EPI 100s). I would guess the average would be under a hundred bucks -- people ask more, but you can find them for significantly less. So fixing them for significantly less than a hundred might make sense, and this would seem to me to be useful advice to the poster (who, I realize is actually not the original poster which confuses the issue).
It is also true that there are many better used speakers out there for not all that much more than a hundred, including many made by EPI and its offshoots. Which then raises the question of how much its worth fixing these specific EPIs, and whether, having found out that the woofer in the thrift store M100s was fried, the poster might do better to keep looking than to put more than the original sum into the M 100s.
The comparison with 700 dollar speakers seems to me to suggest that its worth putting more into the speakers than the poster should.
 
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