Kenwood LS-V510

I was helping my friend perform a tune-up of his Kenwood LS-V510 speakers.

Friend's speaker at my place

The LS-V510 are 3-way home theater speakers which weight about 15kg each. The model is not bi-wireable and rated at 180W on 8ohms. The speakers are above 900mm in height and are surprisingly power hungry for HT speakers - volume was at about the same levels as my DIY clone LS 3/5a when driving them via the Quad 33-303 setup!

Friend's speakers w/o grill

Listening to them in stock form, the HF and mid seem a bit muddle when used in a non-HT mode. Bass is plentiful but can be a bit muddle when you crank up the volume as the speakers were just place on the floor.

Once the woofer was removed, you could see there are only some sound dampening material at the bottom of the cavity. Rest of the internal cavity was bare.

The tweeter is a encased in a stand alone box-like unit. I added some foam around the casing of the tweeter.

The mid is encased in a small canister like enclosure inside the cabinet, with only foam at the rear supporting the driver. I added more foam around the enclosure parameter.

Added more foam to the top portion of the speaker cavity - areas where the tweeter and mid driver was located.

Furthermore, added some spare foam pieces to the lower cavity to help reduce internal echo(s) from the woofer.

Upon usage again, you could immediately hear the difference from the tweeter and mid. Difference in the HF and mid clearity were like night-and-day!!

Unfortunately bass from the woofer had hardly changed. Since we did not have the necessary capacitors and/or replacement inductor to upgrade the crossover, my friend decided to live with it for a while before deciding on the next step of action.

One possible followup action is to obtain some rubber padding or spikes for the base of the speaker.

The following pix of the crossover board shows an air core and 3 steel core inductors (0.33/1/1.2/1.5mH) with 3 bi-polar capacitors (8.2/10/3.3uF). The EC are all house brand items

Will update this thread another day once I hear from my friend again.