Sansui SP1500s. Tweeters aren't working?

I just bought a pair of SP-1500s because they were cheap and in pretty good cosmetic shape. I've read several posts about these speakers sounding dull or muddy, and these definately fit the bill. But it seems none of the 4 tweeters are working. Is this common, or is there some common problem these things have? I pulled one of the mids and sprayed de-oxit on the switches but this didn't change anything. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

That model is famous for blown tweeters, I think they might be 16 ohms each, and they run in parallel for 8 ohms on the crossover, I bought a dozen to find 4 good ones when I had to replace mine. I sold the speakers so they're long gone, Dave.

Thanks, I guess its time to start searching.

David, before you buy 4 new tweeters, why don’t you test the four tweeters you have to see if any are working.

There are a couple of easy ways to test:

1. If you have a multi meter or a digital meter just measure the resistance in each tweeter. You should get an answer in the range of 4 to 16 ohms. No reading at all indicates the voice coil is open and toast. If you get very close to zero ohms, that says the voice coil is shorted out (fairly rare, but it does happen) and again the tweeter is toast.


2. If you don't have a meter, you can hook the tweeters up directly to your amp, but AT VERY, VERY LOW VOLUME. If no sound, they are toast.

David, you must be very careful with this test, as the tweeters could be shorted out and you don't want to fry your amp. Tweeters are generally very sensitive and require very little voltage to make sound, so again make sure the volume is turned waaaay DOWN.


Now, if you get resistance or sound, then the tweeters are working, but something else in the xover network isn’t. (It's also possible that the tweeters are connected in series, so that if one is bad, neither will produce sound.) Add one component at a time to the tweeters and connect to your amp to see whether you can get sound. David, just keep doing this until you achieve no sound. The last component added is the culprit.

Good Luck!

Jerry

Thanks Jerry, I'll check them out tonight and decide which way to go.

All 4 tweeters are working. The crossovers seem to be the problem and seem pretty complicated. Is there a simple test to find the trouble? Thanks.

1st: pull the back off the cabinet and give the tweeter and mid ccontrols a bath in deoxit and rotate them back and forth for about a minute each.

2nd: if that doesn't work you could have bad caps or an open resistor.

I had the same problem as Dave did finding tweeters for mine. The ones I have will be going to my son in South Carolina for Christmas. Let us know how you make out. Hope the deoxit works and you should try it first before rebuilding the crossovers. Be careful not to overdrive them once you get them singing again. Those tweeters are few and far between.