Cerwin Vega Cls-215

[jocko_nc]

Something else...

I have not used them as such, but I suspect the CV woofers are a unique high SPL design that would be suited for high-efficiency horn designs a la Klipsch, Altec, ect. There tons of foam-rotted units out there, one can get them for next to nothing. Eminence, on the other hand, are quite expensive. Those are easy drivers to re-foam. Excellent DIY potential.

The CV mids I have are pro-audio cloth surrounds... The tweets are horns. More DIY potential.

The cabinets are crappy and the crossovers are not the greatest.

I'll take all the CV's I can find (cheaply).

jocko

[spacedeckman]

Another recycled thread that I had a part in. Unbelievable.

I can tell I'm dealing with a lot of young punks here, and I get to play the part of the "old duffer", but an old duffer with over 25 years of experience messing with this stuff, and some years in the trenches working in the industry in my "formative" years.

The CVs in question, as jocko so accurately mentioned had horrible cabinets. They were too thin, and made from very poor quality particle board to hold the cost down. The crossovers were indeed pretty crappy, as were the tweeters and mids. The woofers were actually built quite well, but designed for playing loud, using a pretty short coil and thin top plate (very poor choice for low bass control) which allowed for high sensitivity (loud volumes) with not a lot of power, which CV was known for. CV was always kind of the "Klipsch for the unemployed". The cabinets on all the big CVs of that era would separate or frequently get broken up in shipping. Especially the dual 15s, since the cabinet was constructed poorly, was essentially unbraced, and made a better shock absorber than launching pad for bass.

CVs were not designed with sound quality in mind, they were meant for guys with bad amplifiers to be able to play loud and rock out. That is fun for a while, but grows tiresome with that level of gear. On the other hand, I got to get my grubby paws on a pair of Bryston 7B monos (600wpc, for real) and feed my little 6", 2-way bookshelf speakers which were not inexpensive, but not stratospheric either. I was hitting lower and harder than those CVs could even dream. One of my favorite demos of that era was to take a pair of JBL L1s ($600/pr 2 way 6" bookshelf speakers that were pretty well designed), and play them against those same CVs....volume matched. The CVs had no place to hide. They were bested on all fronts by a speaker less than 1/12th its size. Yes, they played louder, but they couldn't touch the little JBLs for bass, nor were they in the same county for sound quality.

The old D-series CVs up to the mid-late 80s actually had pretty substantial cabinets, and only failed on the tweeter and crossover front...and bad voicing, but were much better built speakers.