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In Reply to: RE: Electro-Voice Regal lll posted by CraigI on January 07, 2017 at 11:16:21
Electrolytic caps were and still are pretty common in xovers.
They are non polar and don't have a plus or minus side like an electrolytic in say a power supply circuit of an amp so they can be installed without regard to "polarity."The non polar lytic for a speaker xover has to pass an AC signal, not filter it or block it.
"Conventional wisdom" says that if can use a film and foil cap, like the Daytons or a paper in oil cap in place of a lytic, it's a good thing.
But when your talking about higher values, the size and cost is a consideration and the lytics are smaller and less expensive.
When your talking about a 2.8 uf and 5.7 uf, that isn't an issue and even back when those speakers were made the 2.7 UF and 5.7 UF values weren't large enough so that a lytic was the only practical choice in size or price.
Lytics are usually obvious because they are in a sealed metal package sometimes with a plastic like wrapping on them that has the data printed on it.
The cap values in your xover didn't need to be lytics because of cost or size and they appear to be some kind of film and foil not of the lytic variety due to the way they are packaged.
My EV Esquire 200's has two lytics in the xover but those values are much higher, 40 uf and 140 uf I think. At the time a film and foil cap of those values would have probably been unavailable or just too nuts to think about and the use of paper in oil caps like motor run caps with those higher values wasn't by any means common place due to size and price so they were non polar lytics and still are, but new ones.
Unfortunately I didn't save the old 2.84 caps to compare to any new cap in the tweeter. That was before I discovered that new caps can change the sonics for some known and some still debated reasons.
The Daytons of 2.7 uf 250V and 5.6 uf 250 V should be fine. They would most likely be lots closer to the stated values of the caps in there now.
I've never read anything bad about the Daytons so give them a try. Not to say that another brand wouldn't sound different but that's where mind set over price and specs and sonic taste come into play.
A friend bugged me to replace the caps in his Warfedale W70 speakers because he was convinced new caps would sound better.
I choose the Daytons because of price and the fact that I had never read anything bad about them.We did one speaker and couldn't hear any difference between the two. He listened for a couple of days and concluded that we should do the other speaker so that the caps were new in both. Net gain zero other than having new caps so draw your own conclusions because I have no answer other than the old caps were good and the new Daytons provided the same sonic signature.
Yes, like Paul says, it's generally advisable to think about new caps for a couple of reasons but that can open a can of worms with sonics. Just because the new cap is the same value as the old one it may not automatically sound better to you than the good old cap.
Designing xovers isn't rocket science but you have to know all the parameters of each driver and that's still an unknown here.
Then there's the actual listening test to hear what you designed using those parameters.Speakers like the EV 200, 300 and 3000111, were at the time, sort of budget speakers or speakers for those that wanted decent and almost full range sound at a good price or that just didn't want BIG speakers.
And of course marketing came into play because other companies were offering bookshelf speakers and EV's mainstay had been the larger systems.That meant sticking to a price point and using some tricks in design to achieve a result that was satisfactory. It's hard to second guess those designs as to why they were done that way.
The same holds true today with price points versus design and performance.
Edits: 01/07/17 01/07/17Follow Ups:
Dave V,
Thanks for the education. I'm with you on preserving the the original sound. Since this is my first project it still interests me to try to "improve" the original. I know these speakers were lower end; good first project.
Your welcome CraigThose speakers aren't that low end. I've heard new speakers that cost over $2000 a pair that don't sound as good to me as my Esquire 200's.
What I meant was that EV's lineup of larger systems were more straight forward in design for the day and used their standard drivers and crossovers.
Those systems are more efficient, better balanced overall, have a more extended low end due to the driver and cabinet size/venting and they didn't need to use what I call tricks to do that.The cap thing is your call. I just cautioned you not to toss out the original caps just in case.
I remember when I got my Altec Model 19's and I searched around the Internet to see what people were doing about the caps.
There was the camp that said to put better caps in and the camp that said they still have the originals and they sound fine to them and were afraid to change the original voicing in this classic speaker.The camp that changed caps had different favorites from metallized and non metallized film and foil to paper in oil so it's very doubtful they all sounded the same in the end.
Some changed the inductors too because the originals aren't air core and they have a higher DC resistance than air cores made with a heavier gauge wire.
I did a quick survey of Model 19 owners and asked them if they had measured the values of the original inductors. The responses I got showed exactly what I found. The actual inductance of all three inductors was different than what was shown on the schematic so the people that changed the caps and inductors were listening to three changes,not just the caps.
So when people offer their opinion there can be more involved too.
If we're not talking about replacing a truly faulty part with a good part then "better" is in the ear of the listener.
Edits: 01/08/17
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