Hello,
I recently had the foam surround replaced on my speaker woofers. I mentioned to Frank what I was doing, and he asked if I had thought of doing his speaker damping mod before reinstalling the woofer. For those not familiar with the mod, it involves applying a bit of modeling clay to the speakers. Check out the following Audio Basic article for details:
http://www.avahifi.com/images/avahifi/root/audio_basics/ab_pdf/ab1982.pdfIn the Audio Basic article Frank suggests Plast-i-Clay, but he told me that any non-hardening modeling clay will work. I could not find Plast-i-Clay, but did find Plastalina at my local Michaels (appears to be their house brand). Plastalina comes in a variety of colors, and is fairly cheap. The key thing to remember is that you need to use non-hardening modeling clay.
The basket/frame of my woofers are stamped steel, which frankly surprised me as I was expecting a cast aluminum basket/frame. Adding the clay was pretty easy, and it added a lot of dampening to the basket/frame. I didn’t add clay to the magnet assembly simply because it was already very substantial, and I felt that if any part of the speaker was going to have issues with vibration it was going to be the basket/frame. Note that it’s important to not get any clay on the speaker cone or any of the moving parts (spider, wires, etc).
Once I got both speakers coated with clay (about ¾ of a pound per speaker) I installed them back into the cabinet, and fired up the system. What I immediately noticed was a more controlled low end. The bass didn’t necessarily go any deeper, but it sure was a lot more solid and defined.
The project is fairly easy, and well worth the time.
Larry