RE: AR 93's

[Guest]

Hello,

Going through the crossovers and replacing the old electro's with poly caps does make a big difference in the overall sound quality of these, and most speakers. I just finished rebuilding my AR 338's crossovers and the difference was quite amazing, especially on the top-end resolution. The better the drivers the more difference you'll notice, but you can easily hear an improvement even with the simple cone tweeters in the 93's. In addition to improving the sound quality, there is also the mater of durability. Quite a few tweeter failures can be traced back to old electro caps gone bad from age or excess power. If they get overloaded and arc/ short internally, often the connected tweeter goes with them. Modern poly caps do not degrade with age, are self-healing in design, and basically impossible to overload under any home audio situations. The tweeter caps are a small value and cheap, maybe $3-$3.50 each. There will be a much larger cap on the 8" midrange, in the 40-60uf range if I remember correctly, and a straight poly cap of that value will be around $15-$18. For larger values you can get away with a new electro cap bypassed with a poly cap and save a bit of money, but not a lot.

About the only way to "squeeze" any more bass out of the 93's is to do a woofer upgrade. The 93's dual 8's will play quite loud for a sealed system, but they will only go so low. The big limitation here is total cabinet volume...take the very nice stock AR 8" woofers and make the box twice as large and you'd be quite happy with their bass.... but since you can't do that, it comes into a tug-of-war between the driver's Fs and Vas. The driver of choice here is one of the Peerless poly cone models. With an Fs of 15 Hz lower than the AR woofer, they are capable of considerably more bottom end from the given cabinet size. They are a drop-in fit in most cabinets, but you do have to re-drill the screw holes. These woofers run $56 for the "standard" model which is an admirable performer, to $69 for the all-out large magnet DVC model that is nothing short of spectacular . Only drawback would be your total cost. Even going the cheapest route for the woofers, you're still looking at over $220 to refit both cabinets. For that type of investment you could spend a few dollars more and build yourself a good subwoofer to fill out the bottom end, leaving your AR's intact.