The Things you find …
Just to be clear, this is not a “how to” post. This is a “what I have been doing during the pandemic” post.
Anyway, under the heading of “the things you find” are these Band & Olufsen Beovox S2200 loudspeakers. It has been said that there is a cult of B & O, and I am guessing that is true. I might be a member, and if you every get the opportunity to become personally familiar with classic B & O you will probably be signing up, too.
Anyway, I had occasion to purchase this pair of speakers cheaply. The only problem was that the needed some work.
- Both woofers needed to be re-foamed as the surrounds were shot.
- One tweeter was not working.
There is always a certain level of anxiety associated with the purchase of old hifi gear. In this case the price for these Beovox goodies was so low that if all else failed they could be turned into reasonably price plant stands and I would still come out ahead.
What’s Up with These S2200 Models?
As it turns out, the Beovox S2200 speaker was made to be a low-end component for some of the B & O less expensive systems. This is where it gets tricky because one does not normally use the term “less expensive” with B & O. Still, these speakers were associated with the Beocenter 2100, 2200, and 4000 models. Well, that is sort of. I will try to explain.
There is very little information about the S2200 speaker. According to the official service manual, the S2200 and the CX25 are are identical and use the same components. The usual online references, beo.zone, beoworld.org, and beocentral.org, either don’t mention them or discuss the speakers barely in passing. My best guess is that the two different models names are a product of marketing. The name of the same speaker varies depending on which part of the world in which was sold.
The other suggestion that comes to mind is that these speakers are too far down the food chain for serious Bang & Olufsen collectors to consider.
But, Still …
These are true B & O speakers, no matter where in the product line-up they appear. A quick glance at eBay provides a hint of the situation. Non-working parts only speakers can go for less than $100. But at the time of this writing there is a set of Beolab 18 speakers available for a mere $15,999.99. And that is used!
So, the way I figure it, even though these are on the low-end of the price slope, they are still B & O and, honestly, how can one possible go wrong? Right? Besides, there’s a pandemic going on, and why not use a little of this stay-at-home time to something interesting?
Diagnosis
The first thing to do was to diagnose the situation. The front grills are easy to remove. They are made from a plastic frame covered with an acoustically transparent cloth. The frames are press-fitted onto the speaker box fronts. Those fronts are made from fiberglass.
In the photo on the right you can see that the foam surround ring around the woofer is cracked. That has to be replaced, for sure. This photo, by the way, was taken after I had already removed the tweeter.
The tweeter itself required a couple of checks. First, I connected the speaker pair to the tuner and took a listed. For speakers in bad shape, they actually sounded pretty good! But, sure enough it sounded like one of the tweeters was bad.
A non-functioning tweeter could be caused by a fault in the tweeter itself or by a problem with the electronic crossover. A problem could also be caused by bad wiring.
I removed bad tweeter and checked it with a multimeter. By putting the meter in the continuity setting and touching the electrodes to the tweeter terminals, I was able to see that the reading was zero. That meant that something was wrong in the tweeter because if it was good there would have been some sort of reading on the meter.
Just to be completely certain that the tweeter was bad, I removed the other tweeter and checked it with the multimeter, and, sure enough, the needle moved up as expected. Then to be completely COMPLETELY certain, I swapped the tweeters around in their cases and, sure enough, the bad tweeter “traveled” to the other box. That’s conclusive evidence that the tweeter was bad, dead, cooked, and wiped out.
The last think I checked was the crossovers. Crossovers are little electronic circuits that control where the “sound” from the amplifiers is directed. In other words, the lower sounds and bass notes are directed to the woofers and the higher sounds go to the tweets. The crossover frequency with these speakers is 2000 hertz.
I didn’t do any fancy testing of the crossovers. I merely pulled the insulation back and visually examined the capacitors. Everything looked fine, so I pushed the insulation back and called it a day.
Time to Make the List
With this information on hand, it was time to make the shopping list.
- 1 pair of foam surrounds for the woofers
- 2 new tweeters
That is a short list, but there were was one trick. I could not replace just one tweeter. They have to match, so I had to find replacements for both tweeters. But, could direct replacements be found?
In the next post we will discover the results of my parts searches and a bit more.