optimisticzorotl

Just to provide a quick update: refoamed the one woofer and all is good now! Thanks again for the input!

That’s super helpful, thank you! I was trying to avoid taking this foam off because it’s pretty new, but I guess it is probably safer to take that route, haha.

Hi all, I’m pretty new to the world of speakers and just got a pair of AR-18Bs. I noticed one of the woofers was rubbing a little bit on one side, and I thought maybe the last person who had these maybe tried to refoam them but didn’t center the voice coil correctly. I was going to try to shim it without refoaming it (I saw some people have had luck with this on audiokarma, by wetting the spider with some acetone after putting in the shims and leaving it upside-down to dry), but wanted to look them all around first. When I opened the cabinet I found that someone had replaced one of the woofers (pics of the two are here: https://imgur.com/a/tTXBz46). From looking around in the internet it seemed like all of the AR-18B replacement woofers I saw were round ones, but looking up 200037-0 did bring up some original-looking AR woofers with square magnets, so I guess the round one is the replacement? On top of that, the magnet set-up on the square one is off-center, as you can see in the picture.What’s the best approach to take in this situation? Is the rub potentially more related to the magnet being askew, and can I fix that without refoaming or reconing the whole thing? Should I still try to shim the voice coil? Should I just replace one of them, or both of them so that they match? I appreciate the expertise!