Replacing the drivers in my surround sound system..

[ojrules]

I have a acoustic solutions 5.1 surround sound system i bought a good few years ago.. and i was wondering how much of an improvement in sound would i get by replacing the exisiting drivers with better quality ones?..

I've got some experience, as i've ust built myself a 200w amp and am in the process of building the speaker cabinets... I just wonder is it the actual speaker cones that make one surround system better than another?.. aka would it be worth say £30-£50 replacing each speaker with the increase in the quality of sound i would get?

 

[mattyfez]

The materials, construction and dimensions of the speaker cabinates are easily just as important as the drivers themselves, also the quality of the crossover which seperates the tweeters from the woofers (and the mids if your using a 3-way crossover)...the sound can also be tuned by the size, shape and position of ports in the cabinate.
The crossover cutoffs also need to compliment the frequency ranges of the drivers to avoid holes in the sound.

So really its a lot of factors that work together to give the final sound, like any speaker system the drivers themselves are just one part of the equation, ive built some two way disco cabinates before, using fairly cheap horns an 12" woofers, you can make a mediocre driver sound great in the right box, and you can also make an expensive one sound cheap...

I think the problem with swapping the drivers would be that the existing crossover and box is not nessesarily going to compliment the specs of the new driver(s) you could end up making it sound worse!

 

[MikeHunt79]

What amp did you build and how many channels does it have?

Also, I think you'd be better off just building new cabinets as well, as the driver and crossover and cabinet all need to match up well for it to sound good...

If you just put new drivers in existing cabs I'm 99% sure it will sound awful...