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JBL 4435 Bucket List Countdown

Good to hear from you Bart. Seems to have been a while. You need to get in on our So Cal gatherings. Also, there are a few in the group who would kill to have a pair of your Rogers. :naughty:
 
Wow, tons of good advice and priceless experience to learn from there.

There is not any room to raise the 4435's up with the Polks on top. To make it worse I added a pair of Polk LSiM 707's up there also. They nicely frame the projector screen now. Just a little corner is chopped out by one of the 4435's. The KEF's were part of my rotating speakers. I swap in which ever speaker I have recently restored so I can listen to them for a while. Polk Monitor 10's are in place now. [I could feel the cringe from here].

I have cleaned the crossover switches with Deoxit. That was a huge improvement on the right speaker. Not as noticeable on the left. There is still something not-quite-perfect about the left speaker. Even if I move the couch out of the way. It is not huge but noticeable if switching balance left to right with a mono source.

I have capacitors sitting in a bag to replace all the caps. I am replacing most of the resistors also. Still waiting on one resistor to show up. I am leaving the 4-64ohm resistors for the woofer in place. Hard to find those values. Caps are mostly Solen with Theta bypasses and one Audiocap bypass for the high end. I will be removing the crossover switch at the same time. And installing banana jacks. I was considering bypassing the lpads/pots but that will be for another day. yes, I will bypass them correctly by replacing with the correct resistance. The speakers sound best to me with those adjustments at "0" so that says take them out to me.

Some day I might add some more high end drivers but to be honest I don't think anything over 15k is getting through my ears and into my brain anymore. I have to use instruments to see if "super tweeters" are working.

I find that the 707's are my "next best" speakers. They have surprising base and near perfect highs/mids. They are not in an optimal location on top of the 4435's and cannot be turned upside-down like the RTIa9's can. When listening to the 4435's I am amazed at the sound stage they provide even in the current locations. The 707's seem to reproduce all of the frequencies but they still sound like the sound is coming from speakers. The 4435's fill the room such that with my eyes closed it sounds like being 7th row center as they say.

As soon as PE sends my last 2 resistors I will plow through the crossover replacements and provide 27-8x10 color glossy photographs with a paragraph on the back describing what each one is about.
 
The new diaphragms may handle more power like Altecs symbiotic diaphragms, but you will be sacrificing high frequency response. Stick with the original diaphragms if available that is what the crossover is voiced for.
 
Yes, that thought did cross my mind. The Radians sounded so nice when I put them in but the problem might have been the crossover all along. So the Radians fixed the problem with the crossover and now that the crossover problems is fixed I have 2 fixes in place and the result is a broken. However I am still thinking that I need to take some instrumented readings. My Room Eq Wizard (REW) is not installed on the new computer in that room so I have not been taking any measurements. Just going by what sounds good to me. I'm guessing that I just liked the exaggerated high frequencies and that I now have a pretty flat response. They do sound much more like my LSiM 707's with the new crossover.

But what exactly changed in the crossover with the new components? A capacitor with high ESR should have been making for less high frequency. I measured all the caps and they were pretty close to spec. The only awful ones were the bypass caps that has 200ohm ESR. I matched the existing values except for the tweeter cap (I used 2.2 and original was 2.5). That does not seem like much of a change. The world may never know. But I will say that both speakers sound the same as each other with the new components where-as before they sounded significantly different.

And they all sound really good. And I can put an EQ curve to get the "crazy" high end again if I ever want it. But the purist in me does not like EQ curves. I will post some REW readings if I ever get that working again.
 
Maybe put one of the original phragms back in and compare A/B with the Radian? I’ve never listened to Radian diaphragms in JBL’s but on small format Altec (802), I thought the Radians were too rolled off. Somewhere in between a symbiotik and stock diaphragm.
 
Sorry, the pucker factor on swapping out the diaphragms was a bit too high for me to do it as an experiment. Maybe if the REW readings show really pitiful high end response I will consider it but for now they are very enjoyable to listen to and I have so many other projects to jump on while summer is here.
 
notes...cones & coils on 2234/2235 woofs identical...as noted a mass ring is installed in the 2235.
I was shown how at conehead school.
Anyone biamp them w/5234 with the special cards ?
 
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