LOWTHER and TANNOY speaker driver repairs Guide prices - Lowthers cleaning magnet gaps £40 to full service replacing and remounting foams £110. Repairing or replacing Tannoy cones, voice coils and refoaming HPDs - sometimes even the most mangled can be repaired. Foams can be replaced by rubber or cloth surrounds.
- If you have Lowther units in poor condition, making scratching noises or distintegrating I can service them or re-mount the cones and rebuild them, replacing the foam surrounds and spiders with either original materials (expensive from Lowther listings on www.ebay.de) or generic surrounds with lightweight rubber membrane spiders.
PLEASE NOTE - I have a serious backlog of Lowther remounts to be done. The reason for this is that I am fed up of people having to have speakers re-foamed and am therefore casting new spiders and surrounds out of lightweight silicone rubber
Please phone me if you want to ask any questions I shall be happy to answer and advise -
tel 01342 850594.
I have been using different types of Lowther for 30 years. I have the proper speech coil centring jig for servicing Lowther units so I CAN SERVICE ALL LOWTHER UNITS PM6 PM2 PM3 PM4 DX2, DX3, DX4, EX2 EX3 and EX4 units. I have a special Lowther jig which ensures proper cone and speech coil geometry and have experience with Lowther Acousta, Corner Acousta, Mini Acousta, Worden Panasona, Audiovector, Tractrix 150Hz horn and TP1 cabinets and in particular where to place damping material to get the very best out of them.
I have been able to repair broken speech coils but soldering Lowther silver and aluminium speechcoils is not guaranteed although my more recently developed techniques are lasting well. Conventional soldering can lead to the voice coil wire disappearing chemically within a year. I am using silver connecting wire with special solder and charge £20 for one connexion and £30 for two. If one feed wire has broken in a unit, the chances are that the other will break too, so it's worth doing both.An expensive PM3 unit came to me recently where the voice coil was literally embedded in rust, the magnet gap having rusted up completely and looking like an archaeological specimen. I have been able to restore the magnet and, although costing more than a standard service of course, is worth doing on such an expensive unit.
TANNOY: I have been able to repair broken cones, restore Tannoy cloth surrounds, re-foam and even solder broken and repair mangled speech coils. I can refoam Tannoy HPD units and have cloth surrounds which will fit to avoid issues of foam rot in the future. I have the necessary jig for mounting Tannoy 2 inch speech coils on 12 inch units. Damaged Tannoy Gold or Lynx or other cones and voice coils can often be repaired without affecting the sound and avoiding expensive replacement parts. I have a source of replacement speech coils if repair is impractical and I'm competant at attaching speechcoils to new cones if replacements aren't available. Cost depends on the extent of the job but the cone struts on HPD cones prevent it being as simple job as it should be, so I have to charge some more for replacing the foam. I can simply cut around the struts and fit a new foam, or a new rubber or cloth surround cheaply, but scraping away gunge from under the struts and fitting the foam into that space takes time and care. Realistically it's around £180 each. In addition, if required, I can add damping material to the frame and also underneath the normally inaccessible inner spider so as to kill any sound reflections from within the unit. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2245608500783.2106884.1265258549&type=1&l=0e78f564f5
A basic Lowther service involves demounting the unit, cleaning the magnet gap which can often attract magnetic dust, re-circularising the voice coil, remounting and recentring the coil and testing. £40 per unit. IN ADDITION If your spider is in poor condition, if it will hold together usefully I can apply a rubber coating, gratis. Labour for replacing spider and cone surround £60 per unit, materials £10 so a complete repair job comes to £110 plus postage.
TIME: I can do a Lowther service over the timeframe of a day but replacing spiders and surrounds requires time involving days for glue to dry and cure and so can take anywhere between a week and a month. Sometimes it's necessary to restore a distorted cone geometry: it simply takes time.
I design speakers for specific purposes and also noise cancelling systems. Using experience of Lowther and Tannoy units making sounds appear as real rather than merely reproduced, in particular I work on electronic organ installations and, with pipe organ experience, I voice electronic organs to sound real. For this reason I have taken an interest in measuring specific frequency responses of different drivers which you might find of insterest below and take an interest in designing new systems, in particular avoiding Doppler distortion which I consider to be one of the worst causes of muddiness of conventional speaker designs, as well as having experience in noise containment and noise cancelling systems.
SECURE YOUR SPEAKER REPAIR!Ebay love removing my listings because I was selling an inflatable doll for a Hen Night party. Ebay even cancelled my listing for a rowing boat . . . and eBay don't like Lowther Audiovector front horns virgin from the workshop
Lowther PM6C in Acousta
Tannoy 10 inch Monitor Gold in Tannoy IB
Tannoy Gold Lynx in large vintage Tannoy BR
Tannoy DC100
Tannoy 609
Manger Zerobox 103
Lowther DX4 in front 150Hz Tractrix horn
