BatSpeakers:

The 2226's cut off at 350Hz have the best sound I've ever heard from them.

The 2123 is the kid in the front row waving his hand in the air; "ooh, ooh, call on me!!!" They definitely need to be padded down a little.A 1 henry series coil didn't do anything but introduce some distortion so I'll try something like a 10 ohm shunt and a 20 or 30 ohm series resistor. It needs to come down about 4 dB.

The Fountek CD-2 ribbon lends some nice air and, I think, a bit of transient oomph way up high on cymbals. hard to tell though with the 'bad boy' waving his hand around.

I wonder if taming the mid-driver was what led Dave Cope to call off his FrankenSpeaker project with the TADs?

Is that where I want to be attenuationg the overall output from 300 to 4000 Hz?

Have you confirmed proper polarity and voice coil alignment for proper phase results?

I don't understand how a coil in series with the 2123 introduces distortion???

Run your coil in series with the 2123 with a 20 ohm resistor across the terminals of the 2123 and tell us what happens!

Ron

For your midrange driver, you don't want to use the attenuator configuration I use for compression tweeter padding. It is a special case where I want a specific load on the crossover that makes it underdamped. I do this to create a shelved region for a couple of octaves between the crossover frequency and the HF range where augmentation begins. So this kind of network allows some peaking to develop.

Instead, you want something closer to what I use on the midhorn in the seven π. Its job is to provide pure attenuation without allowing peaking or providing excessive damping. It provides a little bit of damping, but it is pretty much a matched load. I suggest the same thing would probably be good in your speaker.

Try this and see how it sounds for you: Assuming your midrange is an 8Ω 2123H, use an 8Ω resistor in shunt across the midrange driver and a 4Ω resistor in series before that. If it's a 16Ω 2123J, use a 16Ω shunt and 8Ω series resistor instead. For a crossover, try running it wide open and see how that sounds as a full range. You might add a coil to tame the top end a bit. Start off with values around 0.5mH for a 2123H or 1.0mH for a 2123J. I wouldn't use a capacitor, allowing the woofer and midrange to overlap. They're close enough they'll act as a single source at low midrange frequencies anyway because they'll be within 1/4λ of each other.

What caused them to fail? I know you aren't running big amps. Maybe they were blown when you got them? Did you buy them used?

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