Replaced my tweeters!

Flash21

Upon advice from this forum, the other night I replaced the SL2000 tweeters in my Monitor 10Bs with the silk-dome RD0194-1 tweeters. Install is a snap, except for puzzling for a moment over which wire to which terminal...absolutely no information on front or back of the tweeter as to orientation, even the Polk logo goes all the way around. I decided the red terminal gets the black wire, and the unmarked terminal gets the white. Put a little Walker SST contact enhancer on there, clipped the wires on, screwed them back in the speakers and off we went!

Out of the box they sounded very meek, but what do you expect with zero break-in...soon they were opening up nicely, and now I give them a thumbs-up. I feared they would sound too laid back after living with the SL2000s for 20 years, but that isn't a problem at all. They aren't really that different from the old ones, they just lack that "bite" that can sound a little harsh at volume.

So if you don't mine spending $96, I can add my recommendation to this swap.

nadams

Probably would've been the other way around... white to red, black to unmarked.

Flash21

Not saying you are wrong, because I really don't know in this case...but in most conventional wiring, the "hot" terminal is the "colored" one, such as the brass-colored screw of an AC outlet vs. the silver screw...and the black wire is the "hot", while the white is the "neutral". Lacking any directions or other markings with the tweeters, that convention is what I went with.

Of course it is certainly possible that Polk did it differently in their speakers...

jakelm

Nadams, I was corrected by polk CS, that black is always positive in all of their lines and white is negative. Unfortunatly have no way of testing this out. Nadams, did you run a test to show that black is negative? On my vintage 7b's I was alittle confused also. How would you, or anyone else, reccomend the easiest way to test this? Cs told me this , but the tone in his voice suggested uncertainty as well.

Jake

F1nut

SDA, RTA and Monitor series:
Black or blue is positive
White or green is negative

Flash, you got it right.

Flash21

:cool:

nadams

Woops.. my bad. Guess I should check my drivers, then.

jakelm

What happened to just simple ol' red and black?

danger boy

in my SRS. i had one white and one beige in one tweeter?? the rest were white and or green or none at all.

djf

Flash21 wrote:

Not saying you are wrong, because I really don't know in this case...but in most conventional wiring, the "hot" terminal is the "colored" one, such as the brass-colored screw of an AC outlet vs. the silver screw...and the black wire is the "hot", while the white is the "neutral". Lacking any directions or other markings with the tweeters, that convention is what I went with.

Of course it is certainly possible that Polk did it differently in their speakers...

There is a way to do it and be totally certain, which I discovered when doing mine.
The back of the SRS's have a red terminal and a black, with the black being ground. I ran a wire from this terminal long enough to come around the front.

WITH THE TWEETER STILL CONNECTED, I checked the resistance from each of the terminals to the black wire.

Don't pay attention to the measured resistance on the meter. The readings are so close it is an unreliable indicator.
Your ears will tell you. When you bridge (-) to (-) you will hear nothing. When you bridge (+) to (-), you will hear a small pop as the tweeter kicks in due to the ultra low voltage the ohmmeter puts out it uses to measure resistance.

dbnh

Nice to hear from another SST user. Happy listening!