Vandersteen 2C crossover access

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Has anyone successfully taken these crossover boards out? In one piece? :D They look to be glued in with a few pounds of silicone. Bordering on ridiculous. I need to replace the pots and doesn't look doable with the boards in place.

Any help appreciated.
 
I don't think so.

Easy to destroy, maybe. Easy to build new ones, no. I have to reverse engineer it (can't get schematic), then design and make new PCBs, then make the inductors. Not a chance. The speakers are probably worth $400 a pair at most, less with non-original XOs. And only thing wrong is the pots on one XO only. The other one is good.
 
Slightly pry with a wide bladed stiff putty knife along an edge.
The pots can be pulled apart and cleaned once you have them loose. A little Deoxit along the coils will last awhile.

Don,t mess with the crossover unless you have a impulse testing rig and know to do it better than Richard which is highly unlikely

Regards
David
 
Nope, that didn't work. The putty knife has to be slightly flexible in order to get it in there. It does penetrate the caulk, but then it's too flexible to pry it hard enough to dislodge. Only one edge is accessible, from the back only.

I did manage to unsolder the midrange pot and cleaned it. The tweeter pot pins are not accessible.

Interesting pots they used. Solder lug type, not pcb. They cut the lugs off partially. What's left is flat wide blades so they had to put huge holes in the pcb. Then they flooded the huge holes with solder to maintain a sealed box. Truly an amateur hack job.
 
I don't think so.

Easy to destroy, maybe. Easy to build new ones, no. I have to reverse engineer it (can't get schematic), then design and make new PCBs, then make the inductors. Not a chance. The speakers are probably worth $400 a pair at most, less with non-original XOs. And only thing wrong is the pots on one XO only. The other one is good.
Get metal rule, grind it and use as a knife. It is flexible enough to help.

Most probably while you trying to remove PCB board you can damage it, but not the inductors, which you can use in new crossover board.
An advice is to replace resistors and caps. All the resistors to more powerful and most important caps. If you can draw the schematics - community will help which caps to change and to what type.

After such an uprade your speakers will cost more with upgraded components ;) And indeed will perform better.

Take a google search and you will find that owners suffer from those crossover failures, mainly because resistors. That it was the idea why to build better crossovers.

You do not need to make PCBs - just direct connections like this:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
 
I have successfully removed and reworked the crossovers from 2 Vandersteen 2Ce's. What I did was to pry off the board on the back of the speaker that the crossover is glued to. It took a bit to free that as it is glued and stapled in place. After that I worked my way around the circuit board with a large flat bladed screw driver. It takes a bit of pressure to free the circuit board but it is quite think and the traces are very wide so I wasn't too worried about it cracking, it did take quite a while, progress was very slow.

Once I had the crossovers free, I replaced the caps with better quality but the same values, replaced an obviously overheated resister and bypassed the thermisters that in my case were being activated at very very low volume levels and whipping out the bass.

I replaced the wood that the crossovers were mounted on since it was damaged while prying it off.

The end result was a significantly improved speaker.

Hope this helps.
 
Dunno.. these are iffy to diy patch.
Friend has a pair and his were shipped back to the factory for repairs/upgrade.
Yess an expensive PITA. However these things are individually 'voiced' .
No parts are identical, from drivers to resistors, regardless of their makers claims. Vandys' mix 'n match parts / components so their products meet their standards. They think such detail makes a difference.
Replacing bits sans experience and reference standards may or may not 'improve' the sounds.
Feeling lucky ?
 
Yes I'm feeling lucky. More accurately, I feel competent.

I only really need to replace/rebuild the pots, so no "matching" issue there. If I decide to replace caps and/or resistors, they can be measured and replaced with identical values, to within 0.1% if I so choose. There is no magic.

Chris, that is an excellent idea. Didn't occur to me to remove the wood part holding the XO board. I should have thought of that. Thanks.
 
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. They may be voiced to a certain degree but Vandersteen is limited to the parts that are available. They are not having custom caps manufactured. The crossovers in my 2 speakers are using the exact same parts. They could have found 2 sets of drivers that were closely matched and then 'voiced' the crossovers using the same parts. Some of the parts they used were good quality others were not. For instance the resisters are not wire wound, some of the caps are cheap electrolytics.

And just for the record, I never said or meant to suggest that I improved the sound of the speakers from what they were originally. The crossovers had some seriously damaged parts that were negatively impacting the sound, I replaced the damaged parts and noticed a vast improvement in the sound quality compared to the way the speakers sounded with the damaged parts.

Would the speakers sound even better had I returned them to Vandersteen? Possibly, IMHO I don't think so. I wasn't willing to pay the price to have 2 large speakers shipped to Vandersteen and back plus the cost for them to repair them.
 
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For those curious how this process can be here my work in progress. It is not clean, that Hard MDF it's difficult to take a part but it can get done with a little of 2 hrs or so depending on your tools and skills. Will post more pic when I de solder the Speakers cables and all that good stuff.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156424325350160&l=9ba5524d0d

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
 
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