Polymers and armor-all

[Guest Randy O]

I know armor-all has been touched on in past posts, but I was curious about a product called "Wet Look" from Parts Express. It's either clear or black high gloss polymer. What effect does this stuff have on the drivers? I was thinking of trying this stuff on 8" woofers in AR-4x to clean up the 30+ dryed out look they now have and maybe help protect the paper for a few more years. Does this stuff work like the ads say or does it change the performance of the driver in anyway? These are perfectly good drivers that I hate to ruin just on a cosmetic touch-up.

[Guest palomar]

Randy,

I bought a can of the black wet-look stuff from Parts Express. I don't know what it is, but it seems like a black Elmer-Gluish type of material, for lack of a better description. (It may be some vastly different material, but that's my seat-of-the-pants take on it.) It looks really nice, but it does seem to change the sound of the speakers.

I put it on some really old Klipsch woofers that I had, and the midrange seemed to get more colored. This is not to say that it makes speakers worse, but only to suggest that it does change the sound somewhat, and if the speaker is already well balanced, I'd be leary about using it - especially since there is no going back.

Perhaps other users have had different experiences. If I really wanted to do an accurate comparison, I would have applied it to one speaker first, and then compared it to the other. But in my usual impatience, I couldn't wait to get both of the woofers gooped up.

Gary