bye bye Spendor, hello...?

[zix]

After long and faithful service, my beloved Spendor S-100:s are on their way out of service. One of the woofers has finally had it, it seems. For several years, I have had plans on building Ariels, but when at last I really have a perfectly good reason (spousewize, that is) to realize those plans, money is lacking... So that will have to wait for a while.
Instead, I have another (perhaps blasfemous) idea: how about taking out the Spendor midranges/tweeters, together with their crossovers, and putting them on open baffles? I kind of like the sound from them (it´s a Spendor midrange and the scan-speak D2000 tweeter). And then to buy some woofer drivers and putting them in something like the Linkwitz´Phoenix sub, naturally with their own crossovers.

Just to get things going again. It is very mono-toneic at home right now...
What think ye? Is this the road to hell-soundia or could it work? Thoughts, suggestions and ideas are much appreciated.
/zix

[sreten]

Can't see the problem with your basic premise, but one issue
is possibly the mid unit tuning re the crossover when its not
enclosed in a box.

Other than keeping the baffle width the same at the top,
(presumably correct - the open baffle could widen towards
the floor, or straight sided but but folded backwards with
triangular sections) you need somehow to measure the
bass units to get a good match to the new bass units -
if you want to reuse the crossovers unchanged.

You will then still need some passive / active eq for the
bass units open baffle roll off.

You should be able to get decent money for the
empty Spendor cabinets, they don't come cheap.
(as neither do replacement Spendor bass units)

sreten.

[zix]

the open baffle could widen towards
the floor, or straight sided but but folded backwards with
triangular sections

oh yes, I like that last one, folded with triangular sections. Wife would definitely like that better too, and we could use birch plywood or maybe beech. IKEA Pronomen, here we go...

The drivers are arranged in some d´Appolito-like configuration in the Spendors, with the midrange on top, the tweeter inbetween and the woofer in the bottom. I am quite ignorant of the higher school of sound radiation physics, but would the open baffle affect the virtues of this configuration, so that it doesn´t matter which one I put on top?

... ahem, and you also mentioned that the Spendor cabinets might be possible to sell, or rather that I could get decent money for them. Is that in England then? (I don´t think there is much of a market for Spendor cabinets in Sweden, which is where I live - I may of course be wrong in this assumption)

[sreten]

The midrange and treble are inverted to enable a simple extra
triangular section to seal off the mid unit without losing too
much bass cabinet volume.
(A flat sheet from top back corner to directly below the mid unit)

I'm not familiar with the S100 enough to be definitive, but
generally Spendor cabinet quality is far, far above the normal,
and very expensive, all their cabinets are worth a reasonable
amount of money, because they are simply expensive.

In open baffle you certainly could not use the mid so near
the top, (a point I neglected to mention), inverted or
normal I don't know which would be best, so stick with
inverted. But you'll need a lot more distance above the mid.

Bass end wise with a c/o of 600hz life will not be easy.

TBH IMO you shouldn't do such things to a classic loudspeaker,
its a lot better off the way it is, but a dead bass uint is a dead
bass unit, this is not cheap either.

sreten.