Driver equivalence / messing with the Snell J

I'm after some guidance from more experienced speaker designers than myself.

I've a pair of Snell J's that I've slowly rebuilt over the years, due to them having dried out tweeters and rotted foams.

I've been looking into the spec of the original Vifa 8" midbass drivers vs 7.5" SB Satori items and the Satori's seem to better the Vifas in every respect, they also appear (on paper, at least) to be better suited to the 45L cabinets.

The Satori drivers remove the upper mid lift of the Vifas and perform better off-axis, they are also 1.5dB more efficient!

Other than the need for an adaptor ring to mount them, what have I missed?

Many thanks.
 

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Hi,

refoaming kits for the surrounds exist as well as ferrofluid for tweeters. For tweeters domes with fatigued coating, somme shelac in spray or true organic one for furnitures coating are easy to find. Changing the drivers will change the design and the adaptor ring will not couple well the driver to the front bafle imho. Shape of the cones are different, so certainly group delay with the tweeter too. Plus the breaks ups are certainly different too as the clarity (sounding signature) of the woofer.

But indeed one can profit from a cabinet to make a new design or adapt with leaving in place the subwoofer and go for new woofer and tweeter.

Have you purchased the Satori driver yet or are you open to different ones as well ?
 
I've been very pleased with the Satori drivers in my Sonabs, so I do want to use those.

I'm really just looking for a sanity check that the above drivers are suitable or not

Qts = much lower
Vas = much lower, and sensibly just greater than the cab volume.
Efficiency = higher
Response = flatter/ better off axis

What have I missed?
 
The vifa driver info in the first post and also the link from from Mototok are for the the same driver.
Which as Willys Hifi states as being suitable for the Snell K. Which makes me wonder what is the right driver for the Snell J series of speakers. If they were a second hand buy maybe somebody has replaced the original item ?

As to the satori 7.5inch driver 4 ohm or 8 ohm?
I would check its response in that size of enclosure and how long the port or ports will need to be to tune it nicely.

Ideally It would require a new Xover design and the tweeter to make it down to 1.8 - 2KHz or so. What is the advertised Xover frequency for the original 2.5 -3Khz. Some images of the existing Xover and speaker identifications on the magnets would be useful.
 
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Looks like no changes are necessary (unless I've missed something).
The Satori can hold itself together both lower and higher than the Vifa, and off axis. It appears to be good up to 3kHz!

I think the K and the J share the same driver
 
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I agree it would be worth posting the exact woofer and tweeter stickers in your unit as there seem to have been a few different revisions of the J, and the M21 in the K was definitely meant for sealed box.

What are the dimensions of the cabinet?
 
Thanks, I might have caused some confusion..

The actual mid-bass drivers are:
CA21FE/B-SN H334
4 ohm (21/85 Norway)

The tweeters have 94C7ODS written on their backs

Cabs are 13"x 9.25"x 23". Likely 0.5" or 10mm chipboard.
 
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That's a vintage Seas woofer that I can't find the datasheet for, and the tweeter is apparently made by Tonnegan; again no specs.
Well, a 45l vented cab for an 8" 2-way.

I dunno, depends on your goals. I think dropping in a Satori without measurements or any spec sheets for either driver has a random and low chance of good results.
 
Snell tuned each and every crossover to the drivers they were built with.

Back in the day the driver variance was greater than modern construction and to compensate for it, the coils were all wound over-value and unwound to get the desired response, and capacitor values were made up from multiple pieces to get a value that would have the speaker measure properly.

I’ve owned a number of Snell speakers and have never seen the critical capacitor values the same from the Left to the Right in a pair, and generally just leave the factory inductors alone.

Fantastic speakers and they do respond very well to freshening up the capacitors, as they are all getting 30+yr old.
 
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Yes, of course. However, I'm not thinking about changing the tweeters. It's the Seas/ Vifa mid-bass driver that I'm proposing can be bettered by a modern design (the 7.5" Satori).

There's a very nice looking SB Acoustics Berillium tweeter, but let's save that one for later
 
The Xsim info is that that you have posted, is that using the existing Xover or is it your design and you have imported the frd and zma files from manufacturers data sheet or measurement's.
Out of interest what is the impedance of your original woofer when you measure it with a DVM an 8 ohm unit may indicate between 5- 8 ohms a 4 ohm unit maybe 3 - 5 ohms

In terms of the frequency response the tweeter output shown looks a little high, and the impedance peak at 2Khz looks strange to me.

The frequency bump at 3Khz may well be another audible issue.

Snell J's are still desirable items on ebay, maybe re foaming the woofer , refreshing the Caps if they are not polyprops may be sensible to keep the J's as a saleable item.

Use the money from the sale for the tweeters and a ideal box for the Satori, see here for a possible solution.
http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/MW19P-8.htm
 
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