Restoring a home is more than work on the old parts of the house
Not all work performed while restoring a home is on the house itself. There are some things that are necessary for happy life during restoration work, and sometimes those things break. I noticed a number of months ago that the speakers for our livingroom TV and stereo system were starting to fail. I opened them up, and found that the woofer surrounds were beginning to seriously deteriorate. We didn’t want to spend the money on them then, so we let them be. When I moved the speakers into our temporary living space and fired them up again, I noticed some serious issues. Opening them again, I found that the surround on one woofer had completely failed, leaving it entirely inoperable. The other was just about to go, too.
I plan to install wiring for high-mounted speakers in the livingroom and to buy a set of studio monitor speakers to install a high-quality and mostly-invisible surround sound system (all speakers will be mounted on the wall and not inside the wall, so I won’t be doing any irreversible changes to the walls or anything). We didn’t have the money for them right now, though, but we wanted to have working sound while we work on our room. PartsExpress.com to the rescue! They make things easy. A few measurements, and a few clicks, and I had parts two days later. Everything arrived today. The speakers had only a simple capacitor crossover to block LF from the HF driver, so I ordered full crossovers for them. I could have kept the existing HF drivers, too, but I figured I’d order new drivers to match the new woofers in terms of frequency response and impedance, and that made life a good bit easier. A little bit of work later, and the crossovers are mounted and speakers running along just fine. We spent about $100 or so on the new parts, which was far cheaper than the speakers we’ll be buying later. Also, this gets these old units back online, which will be useful later. I think they’ll end up in my home office later. The cabinets were still in good shape, so this made sense.
Well, I’m tired, so I think it’s time for bed. Yay for working speakers.
– jonathan
