Cerwin Vega XLS-215 Crossover upgrade help

[20over]

I bought a pair of Cerwin Vega XLS-215 s with a little bit of shipping damage to the cabinets for a great price.. Stock they sound a lot better than I expected. It seems that the newer CVs sound way more balanced and refined than their old stuff and still go like @#$%!!! I think that they were well designed and are limited by CV building them to a low price point and making them bullet proof for their target market. I think that beefing up the cabinets with some internal braces, and a thicker front panel and adding some XL audio spikes will make a difference.but I think the biggest improvement will come from upgrading the original wiring and crossovers using higher quality parts and also eliminating all the speaker protection stuff. CV was nice enough to send me a schematic of the factory crossover which I will attach to this post. I will be am willing to spend as much as $300 for better parts if absolutely necessary but don't want to spend more than I have to and use the surplus for some other project or more music. They will be used for primarily for playing music in a 2 channel stereo set up. I've built/upgraded quite a few speakers over the years and am pretty good at cabinet construction but have never been very good with crossovers.I would really appreciate any input and advice you can give to help me get the most "bang-for-my-buck" on this project. Much Thanks in Advance!

 

[MrBoat]

At some point, when speculating things like limitations due to price point, you have to question the limitations with the quality of the drivers used more than the crossovers. Especially considering the knowns of crossover design by when those speakers were built which was pretty complete. Computers have been around for a long time by now. I would think that CV has been around long enough to optimize their systems across the board and to the penny. At this point, I don't really think you will make those speakers better, as much as you would just. . . . different.

As far as bracing or other structural concerns, do the cabinets feel like they need more bracing when playing loud? I could see if the cabinets were extraordinarily deep with wide expanses compared to the thickness of the material, but that is something you would be able to feel physically.

I have a pair of turn of the century JBL speakers and my next move was to replace the drivers or rebuild them if there was anything wrong. Turns out that my next move was to upgrade to different speakers entirely and use the JBLs for what they are worth which is still great. My situation ended up being my sources were not as good as they could be. I upgraded that and now all my speakers sound better.