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RE: Electro-Voice Regal lll

Posted by DaveV (A) on January 7, 2017 at 12:21:40

In Reply to: RE: Electro-Voice Regal lll posted by CraigI on January 7, 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 01/07/17

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