Hey Ya'll,
Sorry for posting this here but I didn't really see any place else that was more appropriate.

Ok...was down in the studio night before last trying to get the PA system set up for a small practice and I realized that the horn on one of my speakers isn't working. The speakers are those big ol' EV SH-1502ER's...15" folded horn cabinet, passive cross-over, etc.. Here's the specs if you need them...

http://archives.telex.com/archives/EV/S ... %20EDS.pdf


These are, obviously, great old speakers...I've used these as our mains for a good many years now. Accept for being rather large and heavy, I'm -very- please with their sound and performance. The problem here is that I don't know if it's the horn or the cross-over. If it's just a blown horn, I can easily get a replacement driver for it (standard screw on) but I don't want to waste the money on a new horn -if- the problem is actually the cross-over. Vice-versa, I can get a new cross-over but again I don't want to spend money on that if the problem is the horn. This particular speaker was purchased as an "unclaimed repair" so I -know- it's had issues before but unfortunately I have no way of knowing what those issues were (and the store where I bought them from has long since gone out of business).

So the question is; how exactly can I tell where the problem is? In other words, can I just put a volt meter across the leads (with music playing of course) and if the voltage reads "0", just assume that it's the cross over? Also if I check the impedance on the horn driver, any idea what the reading should be? 8 ohms (which I realize would actually read around 6.5 ohms in DC resistance)???

BTW...the big 15" speaker does seem to be working fine...it's just the horn that's dead...no sound coming out of the horn at all (not even a buzzing).

It's looking like these speakers are going to be put back in to service soon as the new band doesn't really have an adequate PA system...at least not for gigs, so I need to get this figured out so I can get the parts ordered fairly soon. As always I'm quite grateful for any thoughts or opinions on this (however if you're just going to tell me to go out and buy new Mackies or something, -PLEASE- save it...it's -NOT- going to happen!).

Thanks,
Jim

I had a similar situation with our PA at one time, on the Peavey's that we have you can easily access the driver by removing the plate containing the crossover. So I just swapped each part out with the matching speaker unit and than I knew I needed a new driver.

Not sure if that'll work for you, just something I did.

Hmm...ok...yea...duh. I suppose I could just pull the driver out of the other speaker and plug it into the cross-over on the bad one (or check the driver on the bad speaker on the good cross-over).

Ok...I guess I was having a blond moment...thanks.

Jim

A blond moment,

You know, when I first thought to do that when working on our speakers I stood there for a couple moments trying to convince myself if a simple swap out would really work, so we've all done it.

Good luck and let me know how it works for you.

Yea...turned out to be the compression driver. Fortunately I had a spare out of an old home made speaker (which I had also forgotten about) so as soon as I hooked it up, everything sounded fine. It actually took me less time to swap drivers than it took me to find a stupid Philips head! LOL! I'll have to order another one to have on hand and/or see if I can get the old one fixed.

Like I said, just having a couple of blond moments there.

Thanks all!
Jim