Build new cabinet for elipson 1303 drivers

[jeroen94704]

Hi,

I have a pair of elipson 1303's, originally manufactured in the 70's. The cabinets are in pretty bad shape from being moved (overseas) several times, but the drivers and electronics are fine, and I have always enjoyed the sound these speakers produce. Being a pretty decent DIY'er, I'm confident I can build new cabinets, but being new to building speakers, I have a few questions:

1) The drivers are not marked, so I can't see what brand/type they are and therefore I don't know what their response curves are. Is there any way to find out more about these drivers, so I can calculate the best volume using WinISD?

2) As an alternative, I measured the original cabinet volumes for each driver. Can I simply reuse those volumes, regardless of the shape of the cabinet I am going to build?

3) The low and mid drivers are in vented boxes. Does it matter if I place the same speakers in unvented boxes of the same volume? What is the a reason to prefer vented/unvented chambers?

4) The mid driver's vent tube ends up in a second chamber, which is vented to the outside. Can I disregard the volume of this second chamber, should I add it to the total volume for that driver or should I take it into account some other way?

That's it for now. Sorry if these are silly questions, but as I said, I'm new to speaker building. Please be gentle

Thanks in advance,

Jeroen

[Sjef]

This double vented midrange you are talking about is actually one of the most important things in the whole design of the 1303. Elipson used helmholz tranformer to deal with the internal cabinet resonances and the resonances of the drivers. Next important thing was the time allignment placement of the tweeters. Rebuilding the speakers in a completely differnet enclosure will give you completely different sound, this might be for the better but it's most probably worse.

[jeroen94704]

Well, I certainly wasn't expecting to get the same sound and quality as the original speakers. However, if I re-use the volumes (and, from your post, the venting arrangement) from the originals, will I get at least a somewhat decent result, even if the actual enclosure is different?