Almost any woofer can be repaired if you are willing to pay the price. If you treat your woofers right, you should never need more than a surround replaced or maybe a spider. I have been playing speakers loud for over 40 years and have never burned out a woofer voice coil. I have suffered a blown midrange and a blown tweeter as far as burned out voice coils, and I have had several paper cones fail me. Rubbing voice coils can be repaired. What cannot be repaired or replaced in a VMPS speaker would be the midrange drivers if you fried them.
People have bought Klipschorns or large Tannoy speakers and kept them going for multiple decades with almost daily use. You can do the same with VMPS. BG panels should replace the VMPS panels if they ever go bad. I rebuilt my RM1 woofers myself, including fixing voice coil rubbing and the phase plugs that dropped off. I could have just bought new Dayton Audio woofers and considered it an upgrade, but I decided $50 and some elbow grease instead of $250 for an instant fix.
Brian Cheney was never really beholden to any one driver company. He bought the best bang for the buck, and if that ever changed, then he changed with it. As a VMPS owner, that is my philosophy, and I will always have a way to repair my VMPS speakers. I have even modified mine beyond the recommended factory mods. For one thing, you can change the internal stuffing to Acousta-Stuf which is too expensive and time consuming for most loudspeaker manufacturers to mess with. Acousta-Stuf is not ready for use as you receive it and must be fluffed up by hand, which took me one afternoon of work to just fill two RM1 cabinets. Your RM40 cabs would be an all day job. That would cost you $100 plus your day of labor. I also added hysteresis to my passive radiator foam surrounds, which makes them behave somewhat like a transmission line loudspeaker. Remenber the old ScanSpeak vents? That is what they did to acoustic suspension enclosures. The old Dynaco A25 is a classic example. Brian's slot loaded passive radiator and Bud Fried's transmission line each work about as well.
If Brian were alive today, the RM 40 would probably be modified from the sample you have. What you need to realize is that you can do the same thing, but go further and modify it to your taste if you so desire.
