The other day at work I was talking with a coworker about stereo equipment and the brand Marantz came up. I wanted to show him what their amplifiers look like so I did a Google image search for the word Marantz and what do you know, a photo that I took came up in the first couple pages of results! That’s pretty neat, I thought. Maybe I ought to post more photos of cool audio equipment that’s made its way into my house. And thusly begins the first in a series of posts…
First up is another piece of Marantz gear, the HD-440 speakers. These actually belong to the drummer I jam with. He scored them locally for $50 with worn out foam on the woofers. We spent a couple hours drinking beer and re-foaming them and viola, pretty damn good speakers on the cheap. They look pretty svelte too, as you can see in the pics. Those aluminum trim pieces really make them look great with the grilles off.
While we had the woofers removed for refoaming we took a peek inside. There’s a lot of foam batting and the crossover consists of two large capacitors, that’s it. Clearly the Marantz engineers were thinking ‘let’s use good components but use as few parts as possible’. Since there are only caps that means neither the woofer nor the midrange have a high-cut filter. They must have purposely selected drivers that had roll-offs close to the capacitor high-pass frequencies. Either that or they depended on a summed response where the two drivers would combine to form a mostly flat curve.
This was also my first time trying to re-foam an old woofer. It wasn’t very hard although it was time consuming. We also used scotch tape to try pulling out the dustcaps which had been pressed inward. It worked decent on the woofer but the high range woofer had a dustcap made of fiberous material that started to lose some strands even from the light tug of scotch tape so we quickly gave up on that idea. I would do a refoam operation again if I found some speakers which I knew were oldies-but-goodies and just needed a new surround to make their triumphant return to greatness. As with the HD-440s…
