AR90 help

[Guest iamthewalrus]

I just picked up a pair of AR90's. It seems that they were sitting unused for some time. I was told by the previous owner that when hooked up before I came over to buy them, only the woofers and lower mid worked on one speaker...no upper mid and no tweeter. So, he gave them to me. I hooked them up at home and now the one speaker does not work at all. I made sure the audio source and speaker wires were good. I also pulled the woofers to see if anything obvious was wrong. I did not see anything. Any ideas what or where to look?

[ar_pro]

It's unusual for drivers to just stop working, unless they've been burned out.

It is possible that the previous owner tried to repair something, and failed to properly reconnect each driver.

At this point, pulling & checking each driver individually is probably a good idea - at least you can determine if you've got any duds, and go from there.

What part of the world are you in?

[Guest iamthewalrus]

Thanks for the reply!

I'm going through the process right now of pulling each speaker and testing. I'm in the USA, near Philadelphia.

[ar_pro]

Good luck - let us know how they check out.

[Guest iamthewalrus]

Well, your advice was the sanity check I needed. Turns out the "+" terminal was loose on the inside and not making proper contact. I gently moved it and I got audio. That's the good news. The bad news is that the previoius owner was right. The upper mid and tweeter are blown, so here's where I ask the big question. All things considered, is it worth the money to replace these speakers, and any recommendation on where to purchase them?

[ar_pro]

That's too bad.

The AR-90 is really nice system, but if all of the upper range drivers need to be replaced, it could get pricey.

The tweeter & upper midrange dome are exactly the same as used in the AR-9, which increases their desirability. I'd estimate at least $75.00/driver on eBay, unless you got very lucky.

If the lower mids & woofers still have their original foam surrounds, they will need to be replaced; but more importantly, what is the condition of those drivers? If the speakers were abused to the point of blowing out all of the upper-range drivers, it's certainly possible that the other drivers have sustained damage.

Have you checked the drivers for authenticity, too? I've seen AR-9s and 90s where the original drivers had been replaced by non-authentic parts - that would require new drivers there, as well.

Here are the authentic part numbers for your speakers:

Tweeter 200029

Upper Midrange 200028

Lower Midrange 200027

Woofer 200031

[rrcrain]

I just picked up a pair of AR90's. It seems that they were sitting unused for some time. I was told by the previous owner that when hooked up before I came over to buy them, only the woofers and lower mid worked on one speaker...no upper mid and no tweeter. So, he gave them to me. I hooked them up at home and now the one speaker does not work at all. I made sure the audio source and speaker wires were good. I also pulled the woofers to see if anything obvious was wrong. I did not see anything. Any ideas what or where to look?

Off the top of my head, I've no definitive answer. I'd start by making sure the "new" drivers aren't shorted and move on from there. There are people in the world that think they can improve the speakers performance by modifying the crossover, and didn't have a clue to what they were doing; perhaps that's the case here.

You can find excellent schematics of the AR90 crossover in the library right here in the Classic Speakers web site. Download and print them and start verifying the crossovers are wired correctly.

A possible, but not likely problem could be the attenuation switches. As far as I know, no one has had one of them fail, but it's possible. All three failing together? not likely.

In any event, if the crossovers are original, I strongly recommend you replace all of the caps. It makes a massive difference.

[Guest iamthewalrus]

Well, now (unfortunately) the mystery has been solved. After reading the last post by "ar_pro" with the correct driver numbers and mention of the foam surround condition, I took a much deeper look at these speakers. The lower mids and woofers were all identical, so there were no odd-ball speakers in there. Foam surrounds? Nah...these surrounds all look great, but they are not foam. Then the give-away. The model numbers stamped on the lower mids and woofers all point to some Made in Taiwan, crappy-ass speakers by a company called MCM. $30/woofer, $15/lower mid. So what I ended up with was a pair of AR-90 cabinets with 6 worthless replacement speakers, 1 blown upper mid, 1 blown tweeter, 1 good upper mid, and 1 good tweeter.

Not worth fixing.

[ar_pro]

That's really too bad - the original owner probably thought that when the foams rotted out, the drivers were shot, and he replaced them with the MCM stuff.

It's possible that someone might be interested in the two good drivers and cabinets for a restoration project, or you could just sell the working midrange and tweeter in the For Sale section of the forum.