After a few years of re-capping Klipsch xovers

[Alexander]

 

 

 

After having re-capping several sets of xovers like Quartet, forte I/II & klf-xx class speakers this is what I have found*.

 

All the OEM caps tested were in spec uF wise

The NPEs were ~50% of the time in spec

ESR was always high – NPEs were the worst of course

 

Having used Dayton, Solen, Jantzen & Audyn caps – they all sounded better than what was OEM. I just could not justify the cost of using film & foil caps for the price point/ tier of these speakers.

 

I now tend to replace all NPEs with the cheapest metalized polypropylene caps. Usually use Audyn Q4s as the NPEs used are commonly high values & there values have been 2% or better even though they say 5%.

 

So far the speakers that had made the largest impact after a re-cap were klf-30s & klf-c7 using Audyn Plus & Q4s with the klf-c7 center showing the most benighted over all. I should add they also got Miles resistors, ERSE inductors & Crites 3636 transformations.

 

*I should make it clear that I have never done any work on Cornwall or higher Klipsch models.

 

 

[001]

ive done recaps on 2 chorus2, 2 forte2, KG5.5 & some other brand speakers like polk & deftech & lower level older MTX & cerwin vega home speakers. & getting ready to recap 4 more sets of speakers.  im not able to measure caps for esr or uf but can tell there was a noticeable improvement over the 20-25 year old cheap stock caps & on one pair of chorus 2 it was a huge improvement, they sounded like a towel was covering the mids & tweets to where i thought they were damaged or partially blown, new caps made them sound like new again.

 

i used daytons in one pair of ch2 & erse pulse x caps in all others.  erse are priced better than daytons & sounded as good or slightly better to my ears on my system but they are all in the same general low-mid range category as for quality.  i did not change any resistors etc, talking to bob c he says resistors dont change the sound much if any so i didnt mess with that for these speakers.

 

all in all new poly caps can be an improvement over old cheap caps that have fallen out of spec, but i have also heard older speakers sound great & not show any improvement with new caps, one set of choruse2 sounded excellent with stock caps so i left them alone & sold to a friend who has no intentions of recapping them.       

[DirtyErnie]

On my KG 2.5's I did a one-step-at-a-time, one speaker at a time thing when I rebuilt the crossovers. Step 1 on speaker A, Steps 1 & 2 on speaker B, et.c.  Wanted to hear the improvements on each step.

1. Swapped out the NPE's for Erse Pulse X.  Both speakers sounded kinda midrange-hashy before.  This definitely tightened up the frequency response and improved clarity by a LOT.  suddenly, all the treble was available and very clear out of the updated crossover.
2. Added Crite's white caps (can't remember which offhand), series caps for the tweeter.  Cleaned up the treble by quite a bit.
3. Crite's titanium tweeters:  definitely smoother and more extended than the stock phenolic.  

Everybody who says that swapping crossover caps makes no difference either had really good stuff to begin with or has never done this kind of direct comparison.  It was NOT subtle on these.

 

On my CF2's, I've had one crossover re-built for a while and haven't done the second yet.  The difference on these is a lot more subtle, but still better with the updated crossover (however, I'm using some oddball non-standard audio stuff.)