Driver replacement in floorstanding speakers (1 Viewer)

[Drew Dockery]

Currently in my basement I am listening to music on 2 bookshelf speakers sitting on the floor. They're just some 2-way JBLs and while they do sound decent, I want something better while I'm shooting pool for hours on end. I have some older 3-way floorstanding speakers, but they sound horrible. I like the enclosure though, so I'm thinking of just buying new 10", 3", and 2" drivers to replace what is there and use those. Is this as simple as just removing the old drivers and wiring the new ones up? Is there anything I need to be aware of when ordering the new drivers? I've not done anything like this before so any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Greg Monfort]

You can, but the odds are they'll sound worse than they do now. It's far easier to design from scratch, plus doing a three-way half way decent is tough for someone with a bit of experience, so either building a kit or copying someone's two-way is best for a novice IMO.

GM

 

[Drew Dockery]

Obviously I'm new to all of this, so is there a good online resource to try to learn why this is a bad idea? I'm looking to gain some knowledge and make myself something decent. I may consider a kit, because then I could stain it to match my pool table. I was just hoping to use the existing boxes to simplify the process. This will probably be put of until after I make my flexy anyway, but I like to try to plan these things out ahead of time.

 

[Drew Eckhardt]

Reusing the enclosures is a bad idea because:

1) Enclosure size is determined by the driver's Thiele-Small parameters. If the new drivers don't match the old, you won't get flat response.

2) Optimum cross-over points are set for specific drivers

3) The cross-over implementation depends on the driver's impedance curve, which will be different.

4) Notch filters in the cross-over may be necessary arround driver resonances, and they'll be wrong or not there.

Try a two-way or two-way with sub-woofer.