Hey Jim,
I hope you had a great Xmas. Just one last question what about replacement drivers? Would you recommend purchasing drivers and storing them for in the future?
Cheers Rod
This depends on the drivers used. We tried to utilize drivers we thought would be available for long periods of time. The Seas W18's, for example, were originally produced long before I built my first speaker and are sill one of Seas best selling mid-woofers. Same for the ER15's in the SongTowers. I would expect RAAL to be around for quite a while since they produce the best ribbon tweeters on the market. SB Acoustics Satori line should be around for quite a while as well.
About the only drivers I might be concerned about are Hiquphon tweeters as Oskar retired years ago and I don't know how much longer he will be producing his dome tweeters. So it might make sense to purchase one or two of those.
Of course, TC Sounds is no longer around, so the woofers we used in the HT3's and a few other models are no longer available. Same for the Wavecor woofers in the SS8's. Wavecor has an updated driver that is supposed to replace the model we used, but its T/S parameters are not the same and modeling shows the replacement drivers will not play as deep (but would likely work).
So it is somewhat of a mixed bag. But on the whole, most of the drivers we used should have a long life span and continued availabilty.
I hope this helps.
- Jim
