# Redoing old speakers



## okiejaco (Jan 25, 2009)

I have some old Jensen CS-315 speakers and want to reface them or build new cabinest. I was thinking of moving the the mids and tweeters and leave the woofer alone. I would like to have the mids and tweeters on the smaller side and make the woofer side firing. They look kind of like Polk Sda and I want them to look more like LSi 25. Will this work or will it mess them up?


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## evilskillit (Oct 7, 2008)

Everybody is probably going to say it so I might as well. Chances are good that it will sound worse. If you don't know what you're doing odds are very much in the favor that you won't improve anything. The woofers on those speakers probably play into the range of directional sound which means that if you leave them on the sides it will probably mess up the sound stage and make the low midrange sound quiet or wierd in comparison to the mids and the treble.

I was given an old set of galaxy 3 way speakers that had rotted out surrounds on the 12" woofers but were otherwise ok. I could have tried to put new surrounds on the woofers but I thought. Hey new woofers should have more bass and sound better than old rotted out ones so I bought a pair of 12" woofers online. Got the wrong impedence, had to pay to ship them back and then pay shipping for another pair, so I've already wasted money. Got the ones that were the right impedence the things still sounded terrible. Bass was weak, the mid range and upper midrange were terribly obnoxious in comparison and the things were basically not even worth listening to. I stowed them in the attic and forgot about them for a couple of years, now that I've been hanging out on these forums I've gone back and realised how many things were wrong with the woofer I put in there, in respect to both the cabinet and the crossover. I have since taken those 12" woofers out and made a pair of cheap but effective bass bins out of them. Just goes to show how much more you can do with a little bit of knowledge.

Will I ever overhaul the old galaxys? Probably not. I have built a pair of small bookshelf speakers for approx $200 that sound better than those old galaxys ever could, and reinforced the bass using the 12s that I bought for the galaxys that did not work well in that application.


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## bonehead848 (Jan 21, 2007)

The evil skillet got this one right, if the woofer on the bottom was dedicated bass (under 80Hz or so) then it wouldnt really matter if it were on the side. The large woofer in your design plays much higher frequencies than that so moving it to the side would change the sound up quite a bit. Changing anything about retail speakers is a very tough thing to do correctly, if you really want to try your hand at cabinet building there are a number of cheap designs around you could try.


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## okiejaco (Jan 25, 2009)

Thanks guys. That is what I was wanting to know. I am still going to build new cabinets or reface these but that will only change the looks.


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## PT800 (Feb 19, 2008)

One thing you can do is to make the boxes mirror imaged, by moving the tweeter and midrange off center, probably by 2". If you're going to use the original boxes, cut new holes and fill in the old ones.

What this will do is improve the soundstage. I did exactly that with old JBL L212, which are almost as wide (16") as those CS 315 boxes. I use the mirror imaged pair for the main L/R, all the other L212s in the 7 channel system are the original layout.


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