THROW BACK: Repairing subwoofers on my Klipsch v.2-400

[MrCraphead]

EDIT: Sorry, I reposted in the correct forum. Mods, feel free to lock/delete this thread.

Hey all,

My subwoofers in my Klipsch v.2-400 system have blown themselves. I'm not interested in replacing the foam surrounding the woofers, or springing for a set of BX5 D2's or A5+ (need to save up!) and would rather get some cheap $20 woofers from partsexpress.com that have the same frequency and ohm levels.

Which leads me to my problem. I'm not an electrical engineer so I don't know:

1. Are the two sub wired in serial or parallel?
2. What ohm levels are each of the subwoofers?
3. What RMS wattage for each subwoofer?

Based on the frequency response, I'm looking at either of these two woofers by Goldwood.

8 ohm version:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=290-350

4 ohm version:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=290-351

Anyone have any recommendations/advice?

 

[Smoove910]

not sure what you are not understanding... are your questions in regards to the Klipsch setup you have?

If your setup takes two subs/speakers, I would opt for 2 of the 8ohm flavor, then wire them together + to + and - to - to get a 4 ohm load. This should be easier on the amp since we don't know if it's 2 ohm stable (probably not recommended even if it was 2 ohm stable).

You can probably look to see if your current setup is wired parallel or series. Parallel is + to + and - to -, whereas series is similar to a flashlight setup with two batteries.

Speaker A (-) hooked to (-) on amp
Speaker A (+) hooked to Speaker B (-)
Speaker B (-) hooked to Speaker A (+)
Speaker B (+) hooked to (+) on amp

Hopefully I read the question correctly and I explained it easily enough.

Good luck!

 

[bryanl]

1. Are the two sub wired in serial or parallel?
2. What ohm levels are each of the subwoofers?
3. What RMS wattage for each subwoofer?

1. If you find a wire going from the "+" terminal of one speaker to the "-" terminal of the other speaker, they're serial. Otherwise they're parallel, unless the sub has a separate amp for each speaker.

2. This is often printed on the back of the speaker but can be estimated with an multimeter since dynamic speakers have far more resistance than reactance. Approximately 6 ohms resistance indicates a speaker with 8 ohms impedance.

3. That's a trick question since there's no such thing as an RMS watt, at least nothing that makes sense. RMS volts X RMS amps gives average watts, but I don't believe the 90W rating given for the Goldwood woofers is anywhere close to realistic, but it's probably as realistic as any other legitimate company's rating for an 8" woofer. More likely the actual rating is under 25W continuous average watts.

 

[crashtech]

Before proceeding, you may wish to read up on Thiele/Small parameters. There are calculators available on the net to help you make an appropriate driver choice. It's important to know the volume of the enclosure and the dimensions of the port, if applicable.