In 1992 I built a pair of Focal Onyx loudspeakers. They cost an arm and a leg back then, but they were a lot fun to build and sounded great.
They have worked just fine over the last 33(!) years, but of course they have developed some technical and cosmetic issues of course.
And they don't sound nearly as good as they used to - at least to my ears, which are also 33 years older...
So it's high time to refurbish them properly.

I plan to fix the woofer and tweeter surround, replace the Pritex foam, speaker cloth and internal wiring, and repaint the cabinets.

Gravity and time haven't been kind to the Pritex foam - some of it has just turned to dust and the rest is falling down.

Some info on the units can be found here.

The foam rings have seen better days and are coming loose.
I got some replacement woofer surrounds from repairyourspeakers.com.
The instructions can be found here. I found this video helpful as well.



Work in progress, so more info and photos will be added when available.

Some info on the units can be found here.

These units are "only" 18 years old, because the original Seas H204s broke when my Marantx PM-80 amp blew itself up.
I replaced those with some H304s I found on Ebay in Australia. Believe it or not, that was the only place I could find any, so I bought 4 just in case. So now I have 2 spare units in storage...
The H304s are fine, no work needed on those.

Some info on the units can be found here.

These are perfectly fine. The surrounds still look and feel like new.
Seems a bit strange that the surrounds of the bigger woofers (same brand and age) are so much worse.

Some info on the units can be found here.

The surrounds have turned into something resembling brittle plastic; some parts have fallen off and the rest breaks easily.
I got some replacement surrounds from repairyourspeakers.com.
The instructions can be found here.

Repairing the woofers was not as hard as I had feared, the instructions were clear and simple.
The old surrounds broke into pieces, which were simple to remove. I didn't risk trying to get the final bit off of the cones; the risk of damage was too great. So I just glued the new surround on top of that.
Getting the cardboard layer off was trickier, it was really glued on well. Some sticker remover and careful scraping took care of that.

MDF is strong stuff, but it can also behave like paper. This happened while trying to remove one of the mounting nuts from the bottom...

The crossover filters look perfectly fine. One of the inductors needed some hotglue to keep it in place, but that's it.

I think I will try to mount these on the side this time instead of the back, if that fits, to simplify the wiring.