daque13

From what I understand Carlspeak is no longer with us, but I sure would appreciate some photos to illustrate what is being discussed in this thread...

When Snell was in business and servicing older speakers, they were actually selling a different tweeter that 'measured identically,' or so they said. I accidentally bought a pair and sent them back, but that's just me. Otherwise you could source a pair from ebay (which also might be cracked), or buy a pair from Audio Note. If you email Audio Note, they can probably help you. Peter Qvortrup is pretty cool about helping Snell owners. These tweeters are no longer in general production by Vifa, but the ones that Audio Note uses are nearly identical. They'll be expensive, unfortunately.

On the Peter Snell speakers, the only ones I know anything about, the caps are usually cascaded on the xover. I don't have a schematic but I do have a pair of JII's that I could crack open and photograph. What you're describing is pretty weird, however. I'm not sure what you mean about the woofers being 'directly wired' to the input--you mean it's not attached to the xover at all? The photo that JKent linked to is a typical early Snell xover--cascaded caps, chokes, variable resistors. The chokes would be custom wound and the adjustable resistor (I'm spacing on the name of this type of resister--wirewound?) at the top is set (note how it's glued in place) to match this particular pair of JII's to the 'master pair' at Snell. Some say the caps are cascaded for sonic reasons, but a Snell tech told me that they were just combining whatever caps were on hand to get the right value. It's also very weird that there's little or no stuffing. Most original Snells have a fair amount of stuffing, and that's definitely going to impact the mids and lower frequencies. There's nothing wrong with taking some stuffing out to tune it more to one's taste, but little or no stuffing is odd. Peter at Audio Note, which as you might know sells boutique versions of original Snells (he is pretty up-front about it), is a big proponent of minimal stuffing, but then the Audio Note J's are made of birch ply and may be better suited for tuning. Anyway, the long and the short of it is the former owner may have played around with your speakers a bit. Feel free to post a photo of the xovers and insides if you want more advice. I'm in the process of moving and prefer not to open mine up but if you feel strongly about it I'd be willing to do it, if it's helpful.