Infinity WTLC project

Excellent advice

I can't imagine foaming materials for tweeters that small could cost very much so I'll probably pick up the kits anyway and then leave them until I've at least given these speakers a good listening to.

It's late so I am sure that others who have built/rebuilt speakers or have had experience with similar Infinitys will chime in when available. It will be interesting to watch your progress. They were not at all what I originally pictured.

I'd repair that little hole, unsure what to use, but someone may have a suggestion. I'd not bother refoaming them- sounds like they are fine as-is.

I tell you, these WTLCs were a big hootin' suprise, and quite a hit at my party I had here- the fellas were really impressed with them. bass was excellent, though maybe not in the league of the Cerwins you are used to (I've owned Cerwins- tough to beat the bass there!).

The fella who owns the WTLCs also brought the mega-buck, mega sized Pioneer HPM 1500s. He laughed, saying how close the WTLCs performed in relation to the big HPM 1500s he owned, of which he has two pair.

He paid a heck of a lot more for the 1500s, and was goofily, sheepishly laughing about it.

What am I saying, rambling about here? Well, the 1500s were muscular beasts, and sounded great, with a wonderful wide-dispersion top-mount supertweeter, but I preferred the WTLCs, as the highs were almost as good at dispersion and range but to me was a sweeter sound, and the bass from that WTLC was healthy, strong, tight and clean, while the 1500s was brutal.

The 1500s played louder, rocked better, but the Infinitys had muscle and finesse.

The HPM 1500s? Arnold Schwarzenegger with lessons from miss manners and a speech/vocabulary coach.

The WTLCs? Bruce Lee, James Bond and Mikhail Baryshnikov rolled into one, with deadly Ninja skills.

This post has been edited by thedelihaus on January 04, 2007 12:52 am

Someone needs to lay off the TV and pick up a good book

Someone needs to lay off the TV and pick up a good book

Duh, he does now and again.

- JP

Got my refoaming today so guess how I'm spending a large part of my weekend?


They used very VERY strong glue too! Don't make the mistake I did and forget to buy extra razor blades for the xacto-knife! Too bad they didn't make the surrounds out of something as durable as the glue!

cool, good luck and pic's if you've got em'.

Good luck with the refoams. Have patience, take your time, and everything should go smoothly. Looking forward to reading your success story tomorrow.

- JP

good luck!

You know how much I like these. I wonder how you're going to feel about 'em...

Well, ok, it's taking me longer than I thought but I definately didn't want to get in a rush and mess these up!

I've got all four woofers cleaned up and will likely glue them tonight. The old glue was incredibly tenacious! I had to go over them many times and went through many razor blades in the process but I think I only bled once and never nicked a cone I found a very small standard screwdriver to be of great help as well, used like a chisel to work up some of the leftover residue on the baskets that the razor was failing to get up.

Photos coming!

Sounds like you're doing fine. It's been my experience that the glue on Infinity woofers is much more troublesome than with others, much more resilient and seems to do much to gum up the blades. Still, you managed without slicing a cone, which is a major accomplishment for your first woofers (or even a dozen pairs later). Manage to get everything glued up yet? Tried or going to try the battery trick to avoid the need to remove the dustcaps and possibly slice the cones there?

- JP

Finished, for the most part (thanks in large part to you, JP, for introducing me to Gene!)

Photos (click thumbnails for a bit bigger view):

Here is another shot of the screws I was talking about. Like I said even the Ohm/Walsh tweeters on the top are secured with these... they are all identical and the only screws used anywhere in either speaker cab... so as strange as it sounds I almost have to believe they are OEM, even though they would look more in place in my furnace ducting than in a 20+ year old speaker!


Here you can see the four woofers removed. The bottom ones, obviously doing somethng different sound wise from the top ones (obvious upon listening!), have been completely dressed up with what looks like glue giving it that shiny look. I'm sure they are a bit quicker than the top two too:


Flipping them over you can see where someone (at the factory?) marked the positive terminal with red paint, dots of red on the right woofers and pretty red stars on the left woofers:


Brand new surrounds and glue, priority mail!:


Here we are all cleaned up. I took many hours doing this and can only say that the care I put into cleaning these up far exceeds my skill as a photographer


Scissors worked well on a bunch of extra business cards I had in my desk drawer to shim up the voice coils. What a tight fit! This also helped keep the cone high enough in relation to the edge of the basket to ease the gluing process:


Here is one of the inners glued. I was pretty anxious about this because this isn't the sort of thing you get wrong and get a chance to fix! How much glue? How much glue is left in the bottle? Will it be enough? Did I use too much? I think they actually came out pretty nice, structurally anyway:



A solder gun makes quick work of hooking back up the rather flimsy looking wires. It was tough not to consign these for a full upgrade too while I was at it but I really wanted to see how they sounded before investing that much more time and money in them:


Nothing like a rechargable screwdriver to make the last assembly steps a breeze:


Before any serious listening I wanted to make sure they were at least functional. Here you can see "the twins" hooked up to the "B" channel of my standard reference Technics reciever/amp:


All said and done it was a fun and valuable learning experience, refoaming these myself, and I think if I had to do them again I would certianly do it a bit different next time (watch the video!) and if the speakers in question were any more valuable or exotic than what I have done here (or rare surrounds) I would definately consider sending them to be done professionally instead! Certainly something more challenging like the 15" woofers in my DX-9s I think would end up at a professional's shop rather than trying to do them myself. Acoustically I think my repair job will be just fine but cosmetically it's no where near what really good OEM woofers look like, glue wise!

Someone might have noticed by now that my woofers did not have any gasket material at all and in retrospect this was perhaps a good thing as the new surrounds did not fit exactly evenly inside the rim of the basket. Gaskets would have made this proper fitting much more difficult in this case!

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Before I say anything about how they sound I want to supply a little back ground first....

I love music, all kinds, and I probably spend at least 50% of my waking hours listening to some sort of music, every single day of the week including work. I listen to a lot of different music on a lot of different equipment from the cheapest speakers Ford ever put in a pickup truck to stuff that to me is relatively upper-end, like my (beloved) Cerwin Vegas and this particular pair of Infinity.

I guess my confession breaks down to admission of my music addiction... I think I would much rather listen to 10 hours of bad music on bad equipment than one hour of something really good. I hate to admit it but my day would be quite miserable without music so I guess I lean towards the quantity > quality side of things.

The other aspect of my listening habits is oriented around how I spend a good deal of my winter. My line of work is fairly seasonal and thus I have the pleasure of trying to do 12 months of work in roughly 10 months time and then trying to catch my breath in a dark warm place for the most of the winter on un-employment. One of the more inexpensive ways I've found to spend my "time off" is in trying to teach myself what I can about both the playing of music and the production of the finished product.

My basement studio, the "dungeon", is where I spend a lot of my free time, listening a lot, playing some, and learning. During this process I make use of several different listening devices ranging from a pair of mint Panasonic 3-ways (estate sale) that serve as my studio monitors to a pair of very nice Jensen bookshelfs and finally ending up on Panasonic studio monitor headphones as well as what ever I pick out of a drawer full of earbuds and other phones I've collected. The idea, from what I'm told, is to try your music on lots of different systems and gear and go for a happy medium.

Here is a shot of a Technics SA-GX500 reciever/amp that I am actually quite fond of. My neighbor has the exact same model and I fell in love with his first and went through a vintage Sansui, vintage Pioneer, a fairly new JVC and another older Technics before finally finding one of my own on ebay about a year ago. It's a solid workhorse that just keeps on giving no matter what I've asked of it. Rapid bass hits that would test the caps in the best stuff I've heard have never even made this one hiccup. When analyzing, playing and recording sound an additional spectral analyzer is also a handy thing to have, especially when tied to a fairly flexible parametric EQ:


This is one of the Panasonic 3 ways I use as my general purpose studio monitor and "computer desktop speaker", an SB-136D that according to the sticker is rated at 200w @ 8Ohms. Nothing very special but I listen to them a lot, for hours on end, without fatigue or that nagging feeling in the back of my head that I should really replace them so....


Now, in relation to the Panasonics, hooked up to the same Technics head unit, the Infinities were notably quieter needing another 10-15 degrees turn on the volume knob to get the same sound levels that I get out of my Panasonics.

I had to place the Infinities very close together (as seen in the photo up above) as I was limited both in floor space and speaker wire but I really just wanted to hear them work... to know that nothing majorly wrong was evident. Not only are the Panasonics evenly spaced in the corners of the room, a good 12 feet a part, but they also sit on an elevated shelf 4 feet above the floor (perfect ear level when I'm sitting at either my computer or mixer desk) so the Infinities aren't getting a "fair" listening to in my basement without some serious re-arranging of things. I simply don't have the room down there to do them justice...

But what I've heard under those conditions have made me excited, very excited, in the "kid on christmas eve" sort of way. Most notably is the highs... very airy and crisp, even with the speaker covers in place and the soundstage, even with very poor placement, made my heart race. The Ohm/Walsh are very discreet in the mix , providing very little noticable input when you put your ear next to them at volume but they are definately working! I listened to a few of the pieces I key for "serious" listening comparisons too and the mids didn't fail either. The bass, while not as prominent as with the Panasonics, was fast and strong when it needed to be, making my Panasonics sound (for the first time) boomy by comparison. So far I am quite pleased with what these can do!


It's 1:30 in the morning as I write this and I already have the wife's O-K to take over the living room tomorrow where the Infinities will get more floor space and more wattage as well and a serious listening to with my Cerwin Vega DX-9s for direct comparison as well as a larger pair of Infinity bookshelves my neighbor has, if I can get him to bring them along. More tomorrow!

Great post, Oktyabr! Gene is the man when it comes to surrounds. Looking forward to your listening impressions as you get more time for it.

The surround size mismatch is pretty typical, unfortunately, due to the generic nature of all replacement surrounds. Same with the gaskets, most don't fit quite right and are either too small or need trimming to fit. So, I've gotten into the habit of trying to remove the old intact and reusing them. In this case, you don't need them.

The screws are pretty standard Infinity. All three pairs I've had used similar screws, though they were black and some didn't have the slot for a screwdriver. My guess is that it makes for easier assembly and disassembly and may have better suited their preferred method. I like these screws as it's much more unlikely that a screwdriver will slip and put a hole in a woofer cone or surround during reassembly (frustrating when that happens).

Those woofers are interesting, but the differences must suit the design. According to the technical sheet, the woofers are connected out of phase with one another and are set such that they mechanically cross over. The coating on those cones might be a trick to add just a little mass to change the parameters to make this work.

If you can, the WTLCs should perform much better with room to breath. So, hopefully you've heard even better performance today. 'Course now's the time to kick back with a brew, admire your handiwork, and enjoy the tunes.

- JP

looks like you did a good job. i'll bet the more you listen to them, the better you will like them.

A word or two about my WTLCs


Well, I got a couple of solid hours of listening in today. My wife helped me carry them upstairs and re-arrange stuff. She even agreed to be my impartial judge! My neighbor disappeared for one of those suprise birthday parties for a child's friend that he had somehow forgotten about until the last minute so the 10 year old guitar player that lives upstairs sat in for a listen too, between trips to the kitchen.

We listened to a variety of music on them from classical violin to classic rock and a few curve balls thrown in just for fun! I know I don't have the sort of amp and source that would be best for this sort of thing but I did the best with what I have at the moment. I used straight CD sources (no digital .flac files like I would normally listen to) played through a suprisingly good Samsung HD841 DVD player via optical to my Sony STR-DA4ES home theater receiver. I ran my Cerwin Vega DX9's on the "B" channel an d the Infinities on the "A" with fairly good quality heavy guage wires of equal length (about 10 feet each).

A photo of the initial arrangement:



Like the Panasonics in my "dungeon" the Vegas required notably less power than the Infinities to drive at a "nice" listening level. The meter on my DA4 is rated -db and "loud enough" for the Vegas was right around -38db while the Infinities required a bit more twist on the knob to right around -32db even to provide the same sort of volume of sound. Of course I really didn't expect it to be a very fair comparison... the Cerwin Vega DX-9 are nearly 4 foot tall, 100lbs a piece, 400w@ 4 Ohm and 102db of sensitivity with 1 watt! I couldn't find any technical specs on the WTLC but they are obviously no where near that effecient.

So we flipped the speaker selector back and forth and listened to many tracks on both speakers:

Immediately lacking was the really deep end. Where the WTLC were rolling off (they are rated down to 35Hz I think) the DX-9 were just coming really alive. One track we listened to in particular, the fully symphonic track "Rejigue" from Alan Parson's "Try Anything Once" album has a symphony kettle drum that builds early in the track like the rolling in of distant thunder. The DX-9's carried this to our ears from the very first drum beat and probably close to half of this five or six second roll was lost on the WTLC.

My wife was the first to say she preferred the WTLC on "The Hounds of Winter" by Sting, from his "Mercury Falling" album, and I agreed with her. Where the DX-9 was like stepping into a cage match with the incredible hulk, at least when the deep end was really needed, the WTLC was the control and precision of a bald eagle on the hunt, and this is actually a pretty good analogy too! The WTLC were very strong in the mids and highs, sounding more three dimensional than the DX-9s and subtly more controlled in it's transitions between a low-mid bass drum and crystaline ringing of a very delicate chime.

Vocals, we both agreed, were the WTLC's strong suite as were the mids and highs. I heard a triangle here and a crash cymbal there that were perfectly recreated as well and brass was no exception when it really had the soundstage to itself as evidenced in our listening of Rammstein's "Te Quiero Puta" from the "Rosenrot" album (german industrial metal group singing in spanish?!?!)

Next up was B-Tribe's "Hablame" from "Sensual, Sensual". For those that are not familiar with B-Tribe they are a bit eclectic leaning towards ambient, trancy, electronic tunes but most notable for their profluent use of classical spanish guitar and other flamenco influences in their music and it was this element I was looking at trying. I really expected the WTLC to excel here and they did a fine job, as long as the acoustic guitar was mostly unfettered by other sounds and instruments. Vocal chants early in the track were almost ghostly in their ability to be projected deep into the sound field as well, again besting the larger DX-9's for the three dimensional character of the sound. Once a deep vocal hum became a key element in the track the DX-9 carried the song more naturally with a richer tonal presence.

Discouraged but not resigned I popped Regina Carter "Paganini: After a Dream" into the player. Regina Carter is an American, woman, jazz violinist. She was also the first ever non-classical violinist to get to play "The Cannon", a violin built in 1734 for the great violinist Nicolo Paganini... insured for untold millions and touched by only a select handful of mere mortals, truly an Italian national treasure. This CD is her recording of this once in a lifetime event, recorded and mastered with such care as to be a treasure of a sort of it's own and the WTLC's did not disappoint.

In fact this was the one CD my wife and I both agreed 100% sounded much better on the Infinities than on the Cerwin Vegas! You could almost hear every grain of rosin as it danced in the air above the strings, boy that instrument sang. It's unfair to say this was a good example of the WTLC's handling of "highs" because this particular recording of this particular violin is certainly not constrained to a narrow band of octaves but rather dipping quite low for such a instrument on occasion. Again, for some reason, the WTLC's did not faulter here either.

Track #4, "Pavane", starts with what sounds like a rain stick and the WTLC's conveyed the granular nature of the sound with such clarity that by the time the first notes from the violin came in I had a chill run up my spine. Complementing the violin in most of these tracks is an assortment of jazz instruments including a very fine piano, an upright bass and a full jazz drum kit. No where, anywhere, on this whole CD, did the WTLC's disappoint. Very easy for me to quit writing at this point and say these are really excellent speakers for good jazz at the very least.

My particular pair of WTLC, both my wife and I agreed, surpassed the DX-9 for most jazz and classical and did very well with most other instruments and styles of music too, only being pushed aside when thundering drums, electronic pads or bass were added to the equation. They just couldn't stand up to the DX-9's when a musical piece containing a broader range of frequencies was presented, sounding a bit flat, cold, and dry by comparison or allowing the mids, especially vocals, to be overran and muddied by it's attempt at producing powerful bass in some particular tracks.

In reality they are probably the more neutral of the speakers I listened to today, bringing a violin or piano to life in a way I've seldom heard from electronics. Between the two they certainly made string instruments (and the piano) sound as "real" as any equipment I've had the pleasure of listening to in my living room, as well as bells, chimes, cymbals and some brass horns too.

The DX-9's by comparison seemed warmer and richer by coloration and design favoritism of the lower bandwidth. They are what my wife and I are both used to listening to so it is probably to be expected that they sound "the best". On the flip side of the coin the DX-9's are finicky bastards about placing, especially for high volume listening. Even though they are fairly massive they should still probably be about another 12" higher off the ground to make the most of what they have to offer to a sitting audience... the tweeters, especially, are very narrow in soundstage compared to the WTLC's and others, both horizontally and vertically, and need to be toed-in "just so" to make that sweet spot come alive for a lucky listener or two in just the right seats. The WTLC's on the other hand, seemed to suffer no such shortcoming, even when haphazardly placed in a cluttered living room in less than ideal conditions... they always seem to have a very broad soundstage that doesn't suddenly change as you stand up or sit down. Very pleasurable.

Notably the WTLC, while I tried to adjust the volume when I switched back and forth between speaker pairs, really sounded their best when my wife had to leave the room for a bit and I had the opportunity to really put some juice to them. With more wattage the WTLC overcame some of it's bass shortcomings, sounding tight and controlled with perhaps needing just a touch more on the bottom end to suite my likings (no, I never EQ'd them to see), but this was at a volume I knew my wife would not tolerate for day to day listening and my neighbors not even remotely that long

As they stand if they were to be my every day pair of speakers I would almost think about putting either a sub woofer into the mix or at least a bit of gentle EQ with perhaps a low end compressor to prevent clipping. If I had to choose between the two pair of speakers to play jazz music into a large, lively room it would easily be the WTLCs... If the teenage wannabe rap-band across the street was getting too drunk and too loud it would be open windows and the DX-9s I would use to crush them.

I'm tempted to take these apart and see if I can detect any tampering with the crossovers. I'm certain they need more listening and I still want to put them up against something in the roughly the same specs; my neighbor's 2-way Infinity books would be a nice comparison, in fact I hope to be able to take them to his house as his living room is larger and more "lively" than mine too so maybe that will make a positive difference as well.

Perhaps they DO need a full overhaul to restore them to the regal status thedelihaus suggests they deserve?

Will there be a "WTLC restoration redeux!" thread coming to a forum near you? What do YOU think? Time for a little more input from you, my new found friends. What would you do with these if they were yours?

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Disclaimer: I tried to give these a "fair" listen which perhaps is not the easiest thing in the world for me to do. As I've already admitted I am a firm believer in the better of Cerwin Vega's offerings but even then I wouldn't want that to discolor anyone's opinion of CV's based on my ramblings! A side benefit to my "side by side" listening comparison today was reminding me what exactly it was over 10 years ago that made me fall in love with Cerwin Vega in the first place...

Many other reviews I've read seem to box Cerwin Vega into the "loud" "party speaker" category, plenty of db for the $$ but nothing worth really listening to. And to a point, this is correct! Especially with the larger floor models (the AL-1000 are incredible too) powerful, thunderous bass is CV's forte... but that is not in exception to the rest of the auditory spectrum! My DX-9's are some of the cleanest, well behaved speakers I've ever heard, superior in my opinion, to any newer JBL, Klipsch, Polk or any other "midrange" speaker of similar capabilities under $1000 a peice. They really need to be heard to be believed and I hope that everyone gets the chance to do so. If you get a chance to buy a pair for a good price like I did, take it. If you don't like them I'll buy them from you so I can have two pair.

Peace!