New Heathkit AS101 owner - First post.

[alancohen]

So...at 52-years young, I'm finally getting around to building (starting) my bucket list audio system...albeit on a reasonable budget. I've made some DIY components and have a couple of more in the queue. Included was a nice pair of speakers with full range drivers that I thought sounded pretty great. That is until I visited Kevin (KAB) and heard his 803b horns. To say they were intoxicatingly seductive is a drastic understatement.

This led me to doing some homework on Altecs. All I can say is...I'm all in. But I'm not ready to drop $2K on a pair of multi cell horns and 288Ds, let alone a pair of 515Bs w/cabinets.

So after coming upon an available pair of Heathkit AS101s, and learning a lot about them here and elsewhere, I decided to take the plunge. I got them home yesterday and they seem to be in pretty good shape. The drivers appear mint and the cabinets are OK. The crossovers are a mixed bag. The attenuators seem to be fine. The soldering work is meh. It's the caps that are my concern at the moment. One was replaced and the other are old Chicagos with a +/- 10% tolerance. I wanted to keep the XO stock for the time being so I can hear what they were designed to sound like, then I can customize if necessary.

The schematic calls for an 8uF, 10uf and an 11uf. Thanks to this board I learned I can add capacitance by using caps in parallel so I just bought some Daytons:

4 027-226 Dayton PMPC-4.0 4.0uF 250V Precision Audio Capacitor $3.97 $15.88
4 027-234 Dayton PMPC-5.6 5.6uF 250V Precision Audio Capacitor $4.64 $18.56
2 027-244 Dayton PMPC-10 10uF 250V Precision Audio Capacitor $7.65 $15.30

I figure two 5.6s get me close enough to 11.

So here's a few picks. Other than the XOs, what should I be doing to overhaul these relics? FWIW, they sound great to me, but I don't know how much better they could sound. I know those caps are ancient.