Quote Originally Posted by GirgleMirt View Post
My doubts with that is that the RAAL upgrade is 700$ for the towers, and that's basically ignoring/replacing the NrT crossover with the RAAL crossover, in other words, you're only purchasing 2 RAAL tweeters (so around 350 each) for the towers as the price of two crossovers is already included in the original price of the NrT towers, so the RAAL upgrade cost is majority tweeters imho.

So if the upgrade is for the Sierra-1 RAAL tweeter, your current crossover is useless, so you must buy two more crossovers, so if the pricing is similar, you're looking at >700$, not below 800$ in my estimate... Which is a significant cost! It's the original price for the Sierras!

If we take the NrT upgrade, it was 340$, so I'm not sure how great the pricing works.. Sure, maybe volume discounts and all will factor, but a RAAL upgrade will be quite costly... There are cheaper ribbon tweeters available though, some which would probably fit in the existing cabinet...

But thinking back on my earlier guess, my mid cabinet option might also be quite expensive, not sure how much it would cost to make 2 small cabinets + two mids + crossover... Maybe also costly... And performance wise, not having heard the NrT towers or RAAL towers, I could only guess which of these two upgrades would be better... Another thing, the towers use different bass woofers from Sierra-1, so again maybe another component to change? Leaving as is would be ok too, but if you add the mid.. Anyhow, can't wait to hear more details
You make a lot of good points. I've been racking my brain trying to figure out an upgrade path that provides reasonable cost (considering volume discounts), uber performance, and the DIY option. My biggest hindrance is the fact I don't have decades of engineering experience or potent relationships with key vendors.

GirgleMirt, I have to say your guess is pretty good. I think it's logical and reasonable. However, I still do have some unanswered questions in a few areas and haven't come up with any solutions yet.

As I pointed out earlier, the key seems to be the DIY option. Ascend has to streamline the upgrade process so it's relatively straightforward for most customers to accomplish. Consider the NrT upgrade. Dave posted great instructional videos, and the whole process is very simple to do (excluding the extra time involved with the 1st-gen cabinets).

Then comes the area of cost. To me, the earlier discussion in this thread indicated that ~$1,800/pr would be too high for most folks looking at bookshelf monitors. Now of course that included the reworked cabinet, plus all the new components. So my gut feeling is that Dave found 1) a workaround or 2) a new possibility that showed great promise, allowing customers to use their existing cabinets and providing a more "reasonable" cost to upgrade.

Perhaps I should undergo plastic surgery and cosmetic adjustment so I can sneak in under the guise of "Sal." Then I could get a sneak preview.