
Introduction The first speakers that I purchased was a pair of Mordaunt Short
MS3.2s back in the early 1990's (1990 or 1991). That would make them
almost 30 years old at the time of writing this. Appearances-wise they
looked like they survived relatively intact, with primarily what looks like
UV damage to their plastic front baffles. Impedance and frequency
response measurements howere showed something different. These speakers are
currently used as surround speakers for my home theatre setup, where their
performance isn't really critical, but I still decided to have a go at them
to see if I could get them working a bit better without significant
expenditure.

Impedance Tests I did a full impedance test of the
speakers, and both of them suggested that the boxes were leaky. See
that minimum point between the two impedance peaks at bass frequencies? That
should be closer, a lot closer to the minimum impedance measured for the
speaker (around 7 Ohms), but it isn't. I ran a test tone through both
speakers at Fb, the resonance frequency (the minimum point between the two
impedance peaks), and the result was some pretty audible leaking around and
above the tweeters. Definitely something that needed to be addressed, and
that it was present in both speakers suggested that it was some sort of
design flaw. The issue doesn't appear to be audible when playing back music
on the speakers however, except under very specific circumstances.

Frequency Response Tests The results of the frequency
response tests suggested that something was wrong with the tweeter for one
of the speakers, as the response at high frequencies was considerably lower
compared to the other. To fix this would require replacing the
tweeter.
Actions I opted to try refinishing the panels and
replacing the tweeters. I took apart the speakers and removed the front
section of the speaker baffles to find that the rear sections were starting
to detach themselves from the rest of the box, so that needed addressing as
well, which I did by running a bead of glue around the edge and clamping the
box until the glue dried. As for the tweeters, I opted to replace both
at the same time. Luckily it turns out that the MS3.2s use a tweeter that
was very popular at the time and for which replacements are still available,
the Audax TW6. Parts Express was selling replacement tweeters for the
Advent Baby III, and these turned out to be the same Audax TW6 tweeters
mounted in custom baffles, so I purchased two of them for about US$32
in total - a bit expensive, but at least no extensive modifications would
need to be made to the MS3.2s to fit the new tweeters. I also opted to
upgrade the crossovers from the original 6dB/octave crossovers (which
produced the non-flat response curves seen above because of too much overlap
between 5~8KHz ) with 12dB/octave crossovers. I designed them in XSim using
the working tweeter, with the hope than its impedance and frequency response
would not be that much different to the replacements that I was purchasing.
In any case, I had enough spare crossover parts lying around that I was sure
I'd be able to make some minor adjustments if I found them necessary. During
the testing of the new crossovers, I found that one of the Positec devices
for the tweeters was also measuring a bit off (its impedance was double that
of its twin in the other speaker), so I opted to leave them out of the
rebuild - it's not like I will ever be playing those speakers at a level to
have them be activated anyway. Oh, and that leak that I thought was
likely to be a design flaw? It turned out to be cutouts around the
custom tweeter baffle - filling them with hot glue fixed the leaks.
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Results The rebuild
of the MS3.2 speakers was quite successful. The speakers have a
slightly upward-tilting response (a consequence of removing the "positic"
devices from the tweeter circuit in the crossover), but they are quite
listenable, and the response above 4kHz is a lot flatter and there is a much
closer match between the response of the two speakers. The acoustic
crossover point seems to be around 3.3kHz and the response below and above
this point is smoother than what the original crossover achieved. One
tweeter unfortunately demonstrates a bit more distortion than the other, but
I can't hear the impact of the distortion, so I'm not going to worry about
it.
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