It rains, I'm home alone and a LE26 tweeter of my old but beloved JBL 4301B Control Monitors is gone in the green prairies.


It isn't totally dead, but volume is much lower, sound distorted with a lot of armonics (a 5Khz sine doesn't sounds pure, but very "hissing").

What do you think it has? Partially burn winding? What to do? Send to a laboratory to fix it? Look for a new one? Substitute with a pair of new physically and electrically compatible ones (the LE26 sounds good to me but has a paper cone which is not probably "state of the art").

Any advice and/or shoulder to cry upon is really welcome.

Sergio

There there, there there. It will be okay. I've lost a few tweeters in my days too and life will go on.

Recommend replacing the tweeter if you liked the speakers when they were working. You should be able to order a factory replacement online somewhere (looking to other HA members here).

By the way, you may want to look at your amplifier. I've found that too little power or poorly behaving amps are usually the culprits in dead tweeter syndrome. I had some speakers where I would regularly fry my tweeters with a 35 watt per channel receiver, and when I switched to 500 watt monoblock power amps they never fried again. Clipping can kill a tweeter faster than anything.

Good luck; chin up.

Thank you for your shoulder, DigitalMan.

Yes, I liked my speakers A LOT!

The ampli is a (it too old, but beloved and venerable) Revox B150. There should be no problem with it.

I too agree that clipping can be the culprit. I now listen 100% from my PC (mostly from Wavpack lossless backups of my CDs). It can happen that suddently an unexpected sound finds its way to the ampli and the speakers. I used to have a dedicated sound card for listening to music (a Terratec EWX96) that died a year ago. It wasn't configured as the windows primary sound device, so unexpected sound never went thru it. I never since found the time to buy a new one (actually to decide which one to buy). But this time... I'll do.

Thanks again.

And yes... any advice on where to order JBL spare parts will be welcome.

Sergio

Why do tweeters blow? is a very interesting article by Rod Elliot which discusses why small amps (and large amps) kill tweeters.

Google should be able to point you in the right directing for replacement tweeters. Because tweeters don't interact with the cabinet (mostly just with the front baffle) as much as woofers and mids, finding replacements isn't usually that hard. You could also try contacting JBL directly.

Maybe, just maybe, this might be your very lucky day. I have been dragging around a tweeter for an old pair of JBL's I no longer have. I checked the box and it is, yes, an LE26. I will check to see if it still works and get back to you.

Hopefully youare in the US&A.

GREAT!

Unhapply not... My home is Venice, Italy. Anyway I will be happy to check if the total cost included shipping is good compared to what I'll pay here (assuming I can still find such an old tweeter here in Italy).

Thanks, man! I'm sending you a PM with my e-mail address.

Cheers!

Sergio