Hi There! This is my first post. Brief introduction i have a pretty basic and limited knowledge of HiFi equipment and a fairly basic understanding of electronics (always keen to learn though).
Recently went out and bought an Onyko A9010 Amp and a set of Q Acoustics 3020 only to be left underwhelmed by the speakers performance i started remember my love for older HiFi gear and headed straight to Ebay, Google and Gumtree to see what i could find, a few days later i had a pair of very nice coniditon Technics SB-X3 speakers for peanuts. Got them home and plugged them in and on the whole was fairly impressed with their sound.
Not being satisfied i got the tinkering urge and started to pull apart check the internal speaker connections, crossover, and to give them a general spruce up. I them started reading into the capacitor replacement for the crossover and that generally electrolytic caps are bad past 20 years or so. So having never modified a crossover ever i started googling furiously for the types of capacitors to be hit with a minefield of options, prices and types. The SB-X3 crossover features 4 NPE's, 4 Inductors and one Wire Wound resistor in series with the woofer cap. From my week of googling i opted for some Ansar Supersound polypropylene as its suggested they are vastly superior to any electrolytic capacitor in an audio path and they sat at a reasonable price point.
I have just soldered them on today, expecting to be greeted with an uplift in treble brightness and clarity (seems to be the main enhancement NPE vs poly), but only to hear a muddy ruined speaker.
Hours and hours of head scratching and checking soldering i cant figure it out guys. With the new capacitors in place the Mid cone and tweeter's output are effectively reduced by 50-75% over NPE's. More research and reading into ESR issues on Polys vs NPE's i then decided to add an inline wirewound resistor in series with the cap, i tried 0.1, 0.22, 0.5, 1.0 Ohm and none made a discernable difference. THe woofer output seems unacfected and the volume seems inline with normal on the Poly cap, although people seem to leave NPE's for the woofer and use Polys for the tweeter i just decided to renew them all. I have bypassed the speakers mid/tweeter attenuators and that also made no difference.
Where am i going wrong guys? I don't have the knowledge to know what to probe or how to trouble shoot futher. I want to make it work.
I Have attached some pictures of the Crossover. The link to this manual shows the crossover schematic and PCB layout. Thanks for any help you an offer!
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/technics/sb-x3.shtml
http://www.manualscenter.com/manuals/technics/sbx3-service-manual.html#.WdAMQtC6w2w
Recently went out and bought an Onyko A9010 Amp and a set of Q Acoustics 3020 only to be left underwhelmed by the speakers performance i started remember my love for older HiFi gear and headed straight to Ebay, Google and Gumtree to see what i could find, a few days later i had a pair of very nice coniditon Technics SB-X3 speakers for peanuts. Got them home and plugged them in and on the whole was fairly impressed with their sound.
Not being satisfied i got the tinkering urge and started to pull apart check the internal speaker connections, crossover, and to give them a general spruce up. I them started reading into the capacitor replacement for the crossover and that generally electrolytic caps are bad past 20 years or so. So having never modified a crossover ever i started googling furiously for the types of capacitors to be hit with a minefield of options, prices and types. The SB-X3 crossover features 4 NPE's, 4 Inductors and one Wire Wound resistor in series with the woofer cap. From my week of googling i opted for some Ansar Supersound polypropylene as its suggested they are vastly superior to any electrolytic capacitor in an audio path and they sat at a reasonable price point.
I have just soldered them on today, expecting to be greeted with an uplift in treble brightness and clarity (seems to be the main enhancement NPE vs poly), but only to hear a muddy ruined speaker.
Hours and hours of head scratching and checking soldering i cant figure it out guys. With the new capacitors in place the Mid cone and tweeter's output are effectively reduced by 50-75% over NPE's. More research and reading into ESR issues on Polys vs NPE's i then decided to add an inline wirewound resistor in series with the cap, i tried 0.1, 0.22, 0.5, 1.0 Ohm and none made a discernable difference. THe woofer output seems unacfected and the volume seems inline with normal on the Poly cap, although people seem to leave NPE's for the woofer and use Polys for the tweeter i just decided to renew them all. I have bypassed the speakers mid/tweeter attenuators and that also made no difference.
Where am i going wrong guys? I don't have the knowledge to know what to probe or how to trouble shoot futher. I want to make it work.
I Have attached some pictures of the Crossover. The link to this manual shows the crossover schematic and PCB layout. Thanks for any help you an offer!
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/technics/sb-x3.shtml
http://www.manualscenter.com/manuals/technics/sbx3-service-manual.html#.WdAMQtC6w2w
