Last Saturday at the Houston Audio Club meeting we did a listening comparison between a pair of 1.6's with the stock crossover and a pair with a modded crossover. The modded crossover included the following changes: 1) the iron core inductor was replaced with a Northcreek 12ga air core, 2) the stack of Solen capacitors in the tweeter signal path was replaced with a stack of Norhtcreek caps, including 10, 6, and 4.7 mF Zens plus 1.0 and 0.1 uF Crescendo caps, and 3) the original tweeteer caps, with a 3.0 uF Multicap PPMFX cap added to attain the required 25 uF, were moved to replace the stock woofer shunt cap. The stock crossover wiring was replaced with Northcreek silver plated copper, teflon insulated 18 ga wire. The stock binding posts and fuse were not changed.
Upstream equipment included a Denon DVD 2900 modified by John Tucker of Exemplar Audio, a Krell KCT preamp, a pair of Aragon Palladium monoblock amps, plus various brands of high quality cables.I asked the participants to send me summaries of their impressions and received a couple of responses which pretty well summarize the comments I heard after the comparison:
"The reaction from the group was the most unanimous agreement I can ever remember. We played (the un-modified ones first), I thought that based on the room size and placement I liked them very much. Then we played the modified ones and they were alive and the others were dead in comparison-not even the same category of speaker,"not even the same speaker" as Jim said. There was more "life"-not sure if that is a technical term but detail, quality of sound, etc.. No one would even let us, nor was there any need to switch back to the unmodified ones for any further reason for comparison. It was a hands down winning modification."
"I wouldn't have belived that (the) modifications would have made such tremendous improvements over the stock units unless I had heard them with my own ears. It sound as if someone had taken a damp and very heavy blanket off of the speakers. The sound was clean, extended, musical and with more inner detail and detail. The sound was more dynamic. The bass went deeper and was better controlled. (The) modified 1.6's no longer sounded like the same speaker."
The reason I'm posting this is becasue I have found that it's hard to evaluate your own modifications accurately. There's a time gap between the time you last head the unmodded version and the modded one, immediately after you have completed the mod the new parts aren't broken in, and it's hard to be objective about what you hear versus what you want to hear when your equipment is involved. These third party comments confirm that modding the 1.6 crossover with higher quality parts does make a difference.
The total cost of this mod was about $225 for the pair.
We also listened briefly to the modded speakers with single 22uF Auricaps (the makers of this cap recommend not bypassing in the signal path) replacing the cascade of Northcreek caps. The consensus was that the Northcreek caps were smoother and less fatiguing.
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