*HACKING* JBL ARC Center Speaker

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Hello,

Apparently, my JBL ARC CENTER speaker is an acknowledged piece of c*** in JBL circles. The enclosure is nice, the guts (drivers, tweeter) are....not?

Can anyone here give me some help with what components I could put in there that would sound nice? I've already got a discussion going with pictures of the speaker in question on the AVS forum, but that group is more cut from the "buy a better speaker" cloth than "fix this speaker" cloth.

Anyway, the AVS thread is posted HERE. Plenty of pics.

I have also put a slideshow of all the pictured I took which taking this speaker apart on YOUTUBE

I would love to get some suggestions from those in the know on this forum as to how I might go about improving the acoustic performance of this nice looking enclosure by either tweaking what's inside or replacing what's inside.

No worries, I know how to use a screwdriver, glue gun and soldering iron.

Thanks,

g.
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Do you want to use shallow speakers, bookshelfs or use full-ranges?
Here a good driver for a new cabinet, with sub capacities (F3-34Hz) in a sealed 30L is the SB 10" SW26DAC76-4 or a Eka SB bookshelf type 2 Way Kit with crossover layout. For a more difficult project go here with a Faital Pro 3FE20 for a center channel. For the sake of upgrading and testing an easy project with not knowing where it ends you can just test a new set of drivers with same impedance and higher SPL.
 
Looks like a particle board cabinet of a fairly small size. If you were to try and re-use it, you'd probably end up where you needed to cut a new front baffle anyway to fit new drivers...once you get to that point, there's really no sense in keeping any of the cabinet. There's probably not much in there that I'd try to fuss with. You could probably re-use the speaker terminal, provided you could divorce it from that "crossover" it looks like it's glued to.

I'd probably do myself a favor and not spend any money on that, make a pair of overnight sensations with the matching center channel perhaps.
 
looking at the product sheet specs, it's essentially 2x Fullrange drivers with a a super tweeter (9KHz xover), with bass falling off below 100Hz. So consider replacing the existing drivers with a smoother behaving FR driver of the same diameter, or alternatively do some freq response measurements to find where the 'shoutiness' is occurring, and add a notch filter to tame it

Definitely add some padding inside, close up the hole with an old sock to see what difference it makes to the sound... cheap tweaks...
 
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