| Eden 10" driver recone
I recently picked up an Eden D210XLT for a good price. It needed some sweat equity, but hey, the guy didn't charge me for the cat hair...or the mouse poop.
(Eden ports make good mouse doors, it seems.)
When it rains, it pours.
No sooner than I got the first cabinet rehabilitated, than a second one showed up on CL. Cheap. I'm not really a 10" guy, in spite of having owned an SVT and all, but at the price, I thought it was worth a look.
I'll make a long story short and simply say that while the cabinet was in pretty good condition, the drivers were mismatched and ragged out. One was a 4 Ohm, the other was an 8 Ohm, and both cones were badly creased. One voice coil rubbed a bit. (Anyone looking at CL in central SC, beware of the 30th Anniversary cabinet currently for sale. Caveat emptor.) I passed on the deal, as you can buy a functional cabinet for less than it would have cost to buy this one and get the drivers reconed.
That's the background, here's the meat: I already had a figure in mind of $75-100 to recone a 10" driver, but I started wondering what it would cost to have Eden do the job, rather than a local shop.
So I wrote Eden.
1) They no longer recone drivers. They haven't for about 5 years.
2) They will sell you a new 10" driver for $199.99. That's just one driver, mind you, so two will set you back $400, for which you can buy an entire working cabinet.
3) They do not give core credit for sending in old drivers.
4) They do not sell cones to repair shops. They only sell complete drivers.
Hmmm...
So, unless you happen to know--for sure--who OEMs their drivers and the precise characteristics and can get hold of that exact cone, if you recone an Eden driver, you're likely to get something different from the original driver. As a result, the driver is unlikely to match the cabinet and the sound quality will change.
Note that I didn't say that it would necessarily deteriorate, just change. Some people might like the result, but for my purposes, I'd rather keep whatever tone I had. Different is not necessarily better. Tossing random drivers into cabinets is an expensive way to play around with your tone. I prefer something more predictable.
I did a quick search and didn't find this info posted--thought it might be of interest to either those with dead Eden drivers or those such as myself who might want to estimate how much it would cost to bring a dead cabinet back to life. Basically, they'll have to give you the cabinet for free for it to be worthwhile, monetarily, assuming that you want "real" Eden drivers.
Grey | 
