Conditioning Stock RB-5

[leok]

My RB5s are over 3 years old. They have seen a fair amount of use .. nothing very loud for very long. In an effort to determine how stock Reference speaker crossover caps respond to conditioning, I conditioned the caps in my RB-5s. This was a major pain, because there is a cap in the high pass network that is electrically anchored to ground by inductors on each side, and physically locked to the pc board under the low pass cap, and it is glued to both the board and low pass cap. But, in the interest of general information ..

I found the speakers improved in two ways. 1) the high end is now smoother .. a normal response to breaking-in of speaker caps. But the speakers also sound more neutral.

Based on this, I would say that cap conditioning of the stock caps in Klipsch speakers is an important first step in improving performance (possibly to what Klipsch designers intended in the first place). Following this, conditioning should accompany any cap substitution, otherwise, the new cap is realizing only part of its potential.

In future discussions of the sonic advantages of one capacitor technology vs another, if a cap is not conditioned then the comparison is pretty meaningless. For my part I will include PIOs for the simple reason that they exhibit a very rapid, but noticeable breakin, which I would prefer to bypass via conditioning.

Leo

[Tubinhard]

I hate to do this to you, but when you get time, it would be great if you would write a little while paper on this. This is fairly important stuff.

[No Disc]

What is meant by "Conditioning?"

I wonder if the RB-5 IIs would respond the same?

- Tim

[Tubinhard]

http://forums.klipsch.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=42782&sessionID={0D5B97E9-B6D9-49B3-AC54-FCC1A65F578A}

http://forums.klipsch.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=43126&sessionID={0D5B97E9-B6D9-49B3-AC54-FCC1A65F578A}

http://forums.klipsch.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=43297&sessionID={0D5B97E9-B6D9-49B3-AC54-FCC1A65F578A}