I got a pair of abandonware speakers, so I’m making them better. They’re going to end up as another musician’s monitors – I can’t make them true reference, but I can make them a lot closer – and better – pretty cheaply, basically by adding a tiny dome tweeter and a crossover circuit.

I ran a frequency sweep through the factory stock speaker (one on the left is still factory) and found that the single driver started dropping off pretty naturally at around 6000hz, so set the crossover there, first. That didn’t sound quite right so I moved it down to 5000hz so it wouldn’t have to strain, and that was much better.

(For the geeky: single-stage crossover, 7.8uF film cap on the tweeter, .27uH inductor for the primary driver. Sound is… it reminds me of an upgraded Minimus 7, with more low end.)

This is just a phone recording, so don’t expect much – it’s real light on bass, it recorded some, but not much of it, and not well – but still, it’s a before and after and at least gives you some idea about how much these things opened up.

Recording starts with “before” (factory stock) and after several seconds swithces to “after” (added tweeter and crossover circuit), then proceeds to alternate between the two.