So a buddy of mine gave me some infinity studio monitor 100's. He inherited them and they had blown woofers so he did not want them. He knows i have begun my audio journey recently including restoring some vintage mcs 3 way. I thought this would be easy. I had brought 1 pair of speakers back to life and it was not to bad, why not again? WRONG! HAHA the more you think you know the less you do. After reading the little i could find on them I decided to replace the tweeter and the woofer as I read the tweeter was not the best to begin with. Now to back up a little, when i restored the mcs 3 way I just replaced the woofer's that were blown with new ones as close to original as I could find. Back to the infinity's, I tried to locate a new 10" woofer that could be crossed at 2.5k, but struck out without spending an arm and a leg. So I decided to build a new crossover at 2k to try and keep it close to the original sound, while at a point I could find a 10" woofer to go high enough to.
I went with a peerless tweeter and grs woofer. "Did my research" and wired it up for what I thought would be an 8ohm load that I was going for. To bad I am an idiot and for once did not do enough research. After much frustration on my tweeter sounding like shit and the woofer doing nothing, I realized 2 things with additional research. 1: When you crossover at the same frequency there is no series or parallel, there is only load on each(which I am sure most of you know but I did not and found out the hard way lol) 2: 18 gauge speaker wire sucks lol and despite an article claiming it was all you needed for internal wiring of speakers, it does not carry enough current for anything useful that I can tell speaker wise lol. Once again I am sure a lot of you already new that, but I did not.
Went back to the drawing board, rewired them properly with 16 gauge wire, and they sound amazing! I don't know if it is because of all the heartache and effort put in to them, or because drivers are getting really good for cheap, but they sound really good to me.
80$ ish in drivers sound better than my 600$ bookshelves. DIY FTW! Looking forward to future projects and reading about others!
Happy listening!
