My next project: Recapping some Bowers and Wilkins (B&W) DM600 thrift shop specials.

The offending capacitors on the B&W 600 speaker.

I bought some great (I thought) speakers at a thrift shop on Valencia in San Francisco the other day.  Amidst all the usual crap Sanyo and Matsui plastic junk, I spotted some all black speakers on the bottom shelf with the B&W badge.  Knowing that they make a quality speakers, I overlooked the holes in the speaker grill and the bruised corners and took them the checkout to pay my $25 finders fee.

They felt nice and heavy, and when I plugged them into my Beomaster 1900 amp, they sounded pretty good.  Until I moved the balance control over to the left speaker.  All mids and lows, but no highs.  I removed the grill and confirmed my suspicion – the tweeter wasn’t working.  I opened up the speaker and, woah, just a loose wire.  The red wire wasn’t connected at all, so I connected it and waited for victory.  But it didn’t come, still nothing out of the tweeter.

All the blue caps will be replaced.

So I opened up the speaker again and took out all the soundproofing.  I looked at the connection box, and spotted the problem.  The capacitor had a white ooze all over it, and the plastic underneath it was melted.  It seemed to me that, in audio nerd speak, ‘the caps were blown’.

After a little consulting at AudioKarma.com a friendly audio expert reccmmended some new caps for me.

Since the 2.2 ohm 5W resistor was in the trouble zone, I would just replace it. The issue looks like it was caused by the resistor getting too hot.
If you want to, you can replace the 2.2 ohm resistor with a single Mills 2 ohm resistor, rather than 2 resistors to get an exact value, I didn’t know how anal you are about getting things perfect (I am)

Okay, so order two of these http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-242
two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-238
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/psho…Number=027-244
and two of these
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/show…rtnumber=005-2

So, there you have it, my next project.  Stay tuned.