Ultimate Monkfish!

Huge, an impressive result from your efforts and clearly a worthwhile improvement.

On a bit of a diversion, reading your last post on this topic I was intrigued by your description of the improvement you heard on the Bad Pollyanna track so I gave it a listen on Tidal. Gosh, that is a stunning track and I will be delving deeper. 

Doesn't Olivia Hayes have a stunning voice!

And "Define Me" is also a great track in a completely different vein - it's sort of the band's manifesto - both serious and fun at the same time.

Yes, indeed. I have been guilty of 'judging a book by its cover', or rather an album by its sleeve. I have seen Bad Polyanna recommended on The Music Room and I thought, nah, I won't like that - too goth. Well a lesson well learnt.

Enjoy your 'new' speakers.

I had similar results many years ago ... I rebuilt wharfedale 708s crossovers hard wired them and installed new soldered connections....it made a dramatic difference...and did not harm the overall sonic character.....niw doing the same to some Linn kans....these have really nasty little crossovers.

Huge -

Cool to read about your rewired upgrades, and a nice real world example of what, if I understand correctly, differentiates the Kudos Super 10 & 20 from their respective C10 & C20 original models: top spec internal wiring (Chord, I think) and bespoke (Mundorf, I think) capacitors and inductors for the crossover. Nice to hear that these upgrades, which clearly add to cost, add significant improvements over and above any upgraded / improved spec driver choices. Thanks for sharing. 

Regards alan

Iconoclast posted:

I've been told more than once that Proac use rather cheap components in their crossovers.

As a ProAc owner (D20r and K6) I'd be very interested to see some factual substantiation of your hearsay allegation as, I'm sure, would Stewart Tyler! 

I've seen a photo of Proac crossover that looked like a DIY job, with capacitors that were nothing fancy - but it was an early model, and I have read that more recently they have used brands like Solen, so maybe it is partly true, simply depending on when in the evolution of Proac the speaker was made. Of course, back in teh early days of the company  I'm not sure that some of the fancy "audio" caps that these days are regarded as normal even existed.

If Proac can achieve good sound while using inexpensive components good for them.

@ innocent bystander - I tried quite a few brands of caps in my DIY days and regardless of price Solen turned out to be my least favorite.

Mundorf and Auricap XO (at half the price) were two of my favorites. 

I was an early adopter of some of the audio optimised caps in my amp designs

Elna Cerafine* Resevoir capacitors in high stress positions
Sidereal* polypropylene in signal flow positions outside the feedback loop (far too expensive for general use)
Polystyrene capacitors for small values in signal flow positions and single stage frequency compensation inside the feedback loop
Wima 'red' in signal flow positions inside the feedback loop
Polycarbonate plate capacitors as power supply rail 'bypass' capacitors

* These were some of the earliest specialist audio caps in the 1980s

A friend of mine had some Proac speakers that he bought on eBay and were shipped from Italy. On arrival there was some alarming clunking sounds when moving them around and zero bass-due to rough handling some of the ferrite core inductors had sheared off the tie-wraps holding them to the x/o boards. After much back and forth Proac sent a pair of new x/o. They were made with very bog standard parts, that probably would have cost $15 per speaker which were then installed. Later on, beefing up the saturation- prone inductors with some air core ones (yes, I know the DCR was different made a world of difference in the clarity and precision of bass reproduction, for the cost of a couple pints per side. 

I used some sidereal caps in some custom built x/o for the Spica TC50 x/o that I ran for several years. A decent improvement over the standard caps.