The road to nirvana |
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My journey into Photography, Horology, and Audiophilia |
Replacing the Infinity Kappa 200 tweeters
November 14, 2018
The Infinity Kappa 200 are my very first speakers when I built my first decent audio setup. I liked their sonic signature and an affinity to the brand family bloomed.
When I embraced DIY speakers, I lost attention to them and eventually got sold to a friend. I've had a couple of DIY and commercial speakers since then but there's this feeling that I want them back.
The current owner was not able to take care of them and one of the CMMD tweeter got busted. The terminal links are also gone, and two of the binding posts have been lost. Nevertheless, I bought them back and eventually became part of my setup once more.
I contacted the distributor of the brand to seek for a replacement tweeter but they don't have any, I was told that there's a pre-owned pair I might be interested in but upon inquiry it is being sold at a price that is not reasonable - the same price I paid for my brand new unit! Many thoughts came to mind on how to address this issue but they remained thoughts.
The DIY Altec speakers are gone as my original plan was to move to a condominium unit and I won't have the space for them. The 10" Altec speakers on custom enclosure was first offered to the previous owner of the drivers who I still remember telling me that shoud I part with them, he'll get first dibs. Well, I informed him of my plan but he told me he has no use for them anymore. In the end, they went to my friend who own a Chinese restaurant chain.
I finally completed the move in mid-2017 and the Infinity Kappa 200 speakers are once again going to play music.
After setting up the system I started listening to them in "audiophile mode", but the sound from the busted tweeter it is quite noticeable, and affects my listening pleasure that eventually became a nuisance which led me to the purchase of cheap DALI Zensor 3 from Architectural Audio as a stop gap measure.
It was only recently that I decided to unscrew the Kappa 200 tweeters from the baffle where I discovered they were made in France by a company called Audax.
Armed with fresh information and the power of the Internet, I found Audax from Madisound, a popular website for speaker parts and one that is known to me long ago.
I placed the order and in a few days they arrived.
As expected, it is a perfect match from the impedance (6 ohms), voice coil size, and mounting holes.
Perfect fit!
And here is the pair with new tweeter voice coils in all its glory. They do steal attention being off-color from the original design but they sound fantastic.
I took the KEF R300 out the stands to give way for the break-in of the new voice coils for the Kappa.
