Tangent Monitor 6 upgrade

[SimontY]

As I've moved back in with my parents, my listening room is now my tiny bedroom, so I've lent my main speakers away and am using the Tangents. They're a very cheap and poor speaker I bought about 10 years ago - my first hi-fi speakers.

They use a 13cm coated paper midwoofer and 1" soft dome tweeter. The x-over is a simple 2nd order parallel type using very low quality parts. This was a £70 speaker after all.

To make them more bearable I decided to treat them to some small modifications.

Simon

[SimontY]

I replaced the brass links with wire and cleaned the connections with Deoxit, it made very little difference on these.

[SimontY]

Here's what the crossover looks like. Cheap!

[SimontY]

We have two white coffin wirewound resistors, two electrolytic caps, and two puny coils, one iron-cored.

I tried bypassing the caps with 330n stacked polyester film, which I must confess wasn't massively helpful.

[SimontY]

I ordered a new series cap and resistor from hificollective.co.uk and these arrived today. I went for 5w Kiwame carbon resistors as I have personal experience with these and love them, and ClarityCaps as they have a good reputation.

Here's a comparison of the 4.7u bipolar "Elytone" 'lytic and 4.7u ClarityCap from the "SA" range.

[SimontY]

On the left is the Kiwame 5w, and on the right a typical wirewound resistor. The Kiwames are said to be extremely low noise (unusual for carbon types) and have very tight resistance tolerances, almost always leagues better than the 5% specification implied. They also look cool in pea-green

[SimontY]

Here's what the x-overs look like now.

The sound has opened up tremendouosly, and incredibly the benefits have seeped as far south as the bass, presumably due to the way the brain processes the sounds as a whole. Of course bass instruments have higher end output too, in their harmonics. The treble is much clearer and has lost that fuzzy muffled quality I associate with electrolytic signal caps. Instruments such as xylophone and harmonica have much more energy to them.

Next I will upgrade the mid/bass driver series coils, or even try new mid/bass drivers, just for the fun of it. It must be low-cost though.

Simon

[chrisb]

Try getting the reworked XO outside of the cabinet - the new larger parts can suffer from microphonics, even if attached to the PC board with silicone or hot glue.

[SimontY]

Originally posted by chrisb
Try getting the reworked XO outside of the cabinet ..

Thanks for the reply Chris. I can't really afford the time or space for external x-overs. This is something I tried on my main speakers and I found I left them lying on a board never to be housed (due to laziness) and the sound quality gains were only minimal (and confused by issues of reduced connector count etc.)

Simon

ps - bitumen damping and different absorbent materials (ridged carpet underlay has worked for me before) inside the cabinet are things I'll also do if I get round to it.