Janszen Z-600 Bass Improvement?

[LawArk]

Hi: I recently acquired a pair of early 60s Janszen Z-600s. After repairing one of the speaker's electrostatic tweeter's connections, they sound great on the high end, but seem a bit lacking on the bass, which I understand is common with early electrostatics.

Is there an easy way to address this? I thought about adding a powered, wired subwoofer to each speaker, but from what I've seen they only address frequencies in the low couple hundred HZs, and the woofer on the Z-600s is supposed to go all the way to 2000HZ.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks

 

[frommerstop]

As I recall, that woofer is crossed over around 800hz, if it’s making any sound much over 1k, something’s gone wrong in your crossovers.

When working right, those had very good bass, for their time. The reputation you refer to would be for full range electrostats - that’s why JansZen made tweeters for use with ARs, or Advents, and cone/‘stat hybrids.

 

[LawArk]

You might be right about the 800 HZ crossover - I have some promotional literature that talks about the woofer design and 2,000 HZ - I'll go back and look at it.

But you raise a good point that may be affecting the bass performance:

From the schematic, which I attached below, the hi-pass filter seems to be the C-1 electrostatic and the L-1 inductor at the top of the schematic.

But here's the odd thing: when I opened it up, I expected to find a separate capacitor and a separate inductor. But what I found was a what appears to be a capacitor with fine wires wrapped around it (to the left of the fuse in the attached photo). I'm assuming that the wires are just using the shape of the cap to make an inductor and the two together are the hi-pass filter. Does that seem right? Maybe this was a common back then, but I've not seen it before.

Given the age of the speakers, should I replace the electrolytic cap in this part of the circuit? Thanks.

 

[LawArk]

By the way, Frommer, I noticed that you have an Ariston RD-40. I have a working Ariston RD-60 that I bought in 1989 and an RD-50 that I picked up a few years ago. With you, I think that makes about five people I've run into who have Ariston turntables . . .