Sony speaker upgrade question.

[type]

I need a pair of small bookshelf speakers that are either sealed or front ported. I was thinking of upgrading a pair of inexpensive Sony SS-mb150h bookshelf speakers. Here's a link to this speaker:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...Fencoding=UTF8
The Sony's are the perfect size for my space, they have what looks and feels like a good cabinet that is front ported and has a 5.25" woofer. I was wondering if you think that there would be a nice improvement to this speaker if the existing woofers were replaced with these Daytons:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showd...number=295-301

Thanks.

[sreten]

Hi,

I suspect the Sony's will have a very simple capacitor crossover,
consequently the dayton driver is not likely to work well.

In most cases fitting a different driver does not work well,
at least can't be guaranteed to work well.

http://www.zaphaudio.com/audio-speaker13.html

The inverted version might work well if you seal the port,
the depth of the cabinets doesn't look that deep.

Alternatively consider the Dayton BR-1 drivers and c/o.

/sreten.

[acoustixman]

If the OEM woofers have reasonable force factor (BxL) and low Qts, then the biggest improvement you can do (IMO) for the money is to keep them and improve the x-over (Zobel net on woofer + 12-dB Linkwitz-Riley 2-way at 3-4 kHz is good approach, but there are many valid opinions here).

I apologize for getting long-winded here:

I agree that it is likely that the existing "x-over" is probably in the form of the woofer being raw-connected to the input leads, in parallel with a tweeter-capacitor series connection. This common OEM approach is marginal at best, and the essence is that the tweeter is offered some protection against bass by the capacitor. This is not really a x-over, just a bit of protection. It's the cheapest way the mfr can throw it together without frequent complaints of toasted tweeters. The tweeter's resonance probably crops up around 1-2 kHz with a nasty peak right in the vocal range. A 6-dB cap can't really get around this, unless it's so small that the woofer is dominant up to 6-8 kHz. The woofer will indeed make some noise up there anyway [if it has no filter], and you'll have very cruddy off-axis response (woofer cone breaks up and goes out of phase with the tweeter) without a real x-over of some sort.

The woofer-box alignment is probably peaky at 100Hz (sound like a box or large cup) and the only genuine improvement if so is plugging the port for some transient response recovery. It seems possible enough that an OEM 5-1/4" driver has enough magnet to be decent. Usually larger OEM woofers suck in this department. I wouldn't bother with a woofer since it will probably be better than he cabinet itself (probably stapled/glued 3/8" particleboard). I guess I'm saying that if you want a new woofer, you should just build new cabinets too and skip this purchase.

Happy tweaking and listening!

[acoustixman]

If you do get a x-over (such as some recent offerings by Dayton, L-R 12-dB good out-of-box from Parts Express, look for the blue circuit boards, such as PE #260-144), you may need to apply attenuation to the tweeter too, since all of a sudden the woofer won't be trampling all over it with ripply cone out-of-phase crud.

Enjoy...