writethis
Junior Member
Hey gang. Longtime lurker here, former semi-active participant, jumping back in and hope to be joining in more conversations in the days to come now that I have a bit more mental bandwidth available. Soooo after falling HARD for KEF 103.2's a few years ago, I stumbled across a pair of original KEF 105's here in Nashville. They've been great, and I see these as lifetime keepers. They do what I love about the 103.2, but with more authority, scale and bottom end. They've been sounding more dull and less punchy as of late, so I finally decided to pull them out of my main system and take a look at the crossovers. When I opened up the woofer cabs, a couple of big electrolytic caps were literally hanging off their circuit boards by one lead. I'm not a recap fanatic, but this was all it took for me to commit to replacing all the 'lytics in one go. They are 40 years old, after all.
This thread is about determining what values to replace with.
The crossovers on KEF's reference series speakers in the late 70s were hand-matched part by part to hit KEF's reference spec. So I know these caps aren't even supposed to match the listed schematic values. And as it turns out, all of the caps on the speaker A mid/tweeter crossover board still match their counterparts on the B crossover within 1%. But all of them but one pair happen to be higher than listed spec – as much as 20% higher. Is it possible they've all drifted somewhat, and drifted higher? Or am I safe to go with the measured values of the old caps when ordering replacements?
Thanks in advance.
This thread is about determining what values to replace with.
The crossovers on KEF's reference series speakers in the late 70s were hand-matched part by part to hit KEF's reference spec. So I know these caps aren't even supposed to match the listed schematic values. And as it turns out, all of the caps on the speaker A mid/tweeter crossover board still match their counterparts on the B crossover within 1%. But all of them but one pair happen to be higher than listed spec – as much as 20% higher. Is it possible they've all drifted somewhat, and drifted higher? Or am I safe to go with the measured values of the old caps when ordering replacements?
Thanks in advance.
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