Modded Ascends?

[rajacat]

Has anybody modded their Ascends?

Raja

[Lou-the-dog]

Has anybody modded their Ascends?

Raja

Them is hangin' words around these parts pardner.

Randy

[rajacat]

Why? Most other "audiophile grade" speakers have forums which discuss possible mods.

Raja

[PLincoln]

what's there to mod? they sound great out of the box

[BradJudy]

I haven't. Perhaps a good question to ask is if DaveF would choose different crossover components if he didn't have to worry about budget (I'm not sure what you want to mod other than the crossover). I suppose you could try different cabinet filler. I wouldn't expect different wire or binding posts to make a difference.

[Quinn]

There is someone around who modded some 170 classics. I've heard mixed reviews from those that have heard them. The one comment I remember is better bass extension but it was at the cost of the usual great Ascend mids.

I'm kind of the opinion of if these modders are so good how come no one has hired them as designers? Or why don't they design their own speakers like Dave F. has?

[Quinn]

Other thoughts-

1. Ascend's market is generally people wanting value. They aren't likely to spend another $300 on their speakers to try to eek out more performance.

2. Ascend designed the drivers and tweeters so modders don't have any experience with them. Whereas many other companies use off the shelf drivers and tweeters. All the measurements of those are readily availible and all a modder would need is to plug the cabinet in to their computer models.

3. Ascend's sales volume. It doesn't make much sense for a modder to spend the time and money on developing an Ascend mod rather than something with a higher sales volume.

[BradJudy]

I'm not sure what the OP intended, but I didn't read it as having a professional modify Ascends, I was thinking he meant replacing components with equivalent botique components or something like that. No measurement, sales volumes, or designers - just people tweaking their own speakers.

[rajacat]

I'm not sure what the OP intended, but I didn't read it as having a professional modify Ascends, I was thinking he meant replacing components with equivalent botique components or something like that. No measurement, sales volumes, or designers - just people tweaking their own speakers.

Yeah, I was curious if any Ascend owners have modded their own speakers, not just sent them off to professional modders. Perhaps there are some simple and inexpensive tweaks that an amateur could do that would improve the already excellent sound quality but David F. could not add to the stock speaker because of cost constraints.

Raja

[GirgleMirt]

This popped to my mind when reading the thread

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?doc...gen+commercial
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?doc...gen+commercial
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...gen+commercial

Most ricer ca... ahem.. modded cars look ridiculous IMHO vs the original car. The wings they add... Ooops.. wrong subject.

The volks commercial pretty much has it right. Is it possible to tweak the crossover? Sure... But why would you want to do it? Do you really think you could do a better job? If so, then I guess its worth a try, and if you somehow manage to do it, email Ascend with your improvements, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it

Some speakers have poorly designed crossovers which could be fixed (ex: http://murphyblaster.com/content.php?f=RTi28.html), but then if you really wanted to mod your speakers, you probably shouldn't have bought Ascends because but I doubt they need any fixing, just look at their FR measurements...

Besides... What would be left... tweaking the cabinet.. the drivers... all meh. The only worthwhile mod I see would be buying an unfinished cabinet and finishing it yourself... Replacing crossover parts with exotic resistances/capacitators/wires/connectors? Meh... I doubt that would make an audible difference... My uneducated guess is that even if you bought for 300$ of exotic parts to upgrade the crossover parts, you'd be scratching your head trying to differentiate an unmodded pair to a modded pair in a blind test...

[edit] Or maybe... You could build whole new cabinets!!! Yep that might be fun, use a ton of bracing, put two or three layers of 1 inch high density fibreboard for the box and make each one weight in at like... 150 pounds (fillable of course!) Again, I'm not quite sure it would make an audible difference, but besides labour and material costs, it would cost nothing, and THAT, would be sumthin!