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Per Danny's post in this thread in Audiocircle:
I decided to install 1/8" thick industrial tile, coupled with 1" thick open cell foam, inside two pairs of ELT 525M's. This is basically a low cost substitute for No Rez. The specific floor tiles I used were these:
First off, it's a lot of work. Here's the basic steps:
1) Open up your speakers, disconnect and remove the drivers and XO's.
2) Scraping. Sometimes there's plenty of it, sometimes there isn't. In the case of the ELT 525M's, there wasn't much because the speaker is stuffed only with polyfill (no thick felt that's glued down). However, there were adhesive "drips" for gluing the cabinet together. Those drips had to be scraped off. I recommend using a painter's 5-in-1 scraping tool (the one with the roller cleaner) because it's rigid, not like the somewhat flexible regular scraper. The rigidity helps transfer your scraping force to "pop" off hot glue, adhesive drips, etc. that are on the cabinet.
3) Now that the surface is clean and smooth, take your interior measurements to cut the floor tile. The tile itself is "cut" by making score lines with your utility knife, and then bending the tile along the score line until it breaks along the line.
4) Since the tiles I used were self adhesive, you could just install the tiles and press down along the entire surface using a scraper, but your surface had better be clean, flat, and smooth. Otherwise, you'll ruin the glue on the tile, and you'll have to use contact cement to affix the tile to the cabinet. There's a big catch. These tiles are not flexible, so your tile pieces cannot be larger than the tweeter hole or woofer hole. If you try to bend a tile to make it fit into the hole, your tile is not longer flat, and it won't stick well to the cabinet. This also means that you can forget about using this low cost substitute on Rockets (where the cabinet sides are curved).
5) After installing the tiles, you have to use contact cement to glue down the 1" thick open cell foam to the tile.
6) Now that's everything's dampened, put your speaker back together. You'll need to re-use some of the old polyfill to cover the XO.
Here's some photos of the finished product, and well as one photo of all the polyfill left behind.
How do they sound? Well since I was doing 2 pairs, I compared a completed pair to a bone stock pair. I can easily tell that the bass was tighter, punchier, and far cleaner than stock. Highs were slightly improved, but the lower ranges is where the biggest differences area - especially at louder listening levels. I wasn't really surprised at the improvement I heard, since I knew after opening the cabinet that the speakers were constructed using 0.5" thick MDF - good quality for the price of the speakers though and a beautiful veneer.
I highly recommend this mod for anyone with the AV123 ELT line (classic and 525) and the X-series line, since (I believe) both were constructed of 0.5" thick MDF.
Of course, if you value your time and don't want to go through all the trouble to save 80%, just buy the real No Rez. Btw, if you haven't figured it out already, the cost savings depends a lot on how much surface area you have to cover.
I decided to install 1/8" thick industrial tile, coupled with 1" thick open cell foam, inside two pairs of ELT 525M's. This is basically a low cost substitute for No Rez. The specific floor tiles I used were these:
First off, it's a lot of work. Here's the basic steps:
1) Open up your speakers, disconnect and remove the drivers and XO's.
2) Scraping. Sometimes there's plenty of it, sometimes there isn't. In the case of the ELT 525M's, there wasn't much because the speaker is stuffed only with polyfill (no thick felt that's glued down). However, there were adhesive "drips" for gluing the cabinet together. Those drips had to be scraped off. I recommend using a painter's 5-in-1 scraping tool (the one with the roller cleaner) because it's rigid, not like the somewhat flexible regular scraper. The rigidity helps transfer your scraping force to "pop" off hot glue, adhesive drips, etc. that are on the cabinet.
3) Now that the surface is clean and smooth, take your interior measurements to cut the floor tile. The tile itself is "cut" by making score lines with your utility knife, and then bending the tile along the score line until it breaks along the line.
4) Since the tiles I used were self adhesive, you could just install the tiles and press down along the entire surface using a scraper, but your surface had better be clean, flat, and smooth. Otherwise, you'll ruin the glue on the tile, and you'll have to use contact cement to affix the tile to the cabinet. There's a big catch. These tiles are not flexible, so your tile pieces cannot be larger than the tweeter hole or woofer hole. If you try to bend a tile to make it fit into the hole, your tile is not longer flat, and it won't stick well to the cabinet. This also means that you can forget about using this low cost substitute on Rockets (where the cabinet sides are curved).
5) After installing the tiles, you have to use contact cement to glue down the 1" thick open cell foam to the tile.
6) Now that's everything's dampened, put your speaker back together. You'll need to re-use some of the old polyfill to cover the XO.
Here's some photos of the finished product, and well as one photo of all the polyfill left behind.
How do they sound? Well since I was doing 2 pairs, I compared a completed pair to a bone stock pair. I can easily tell that the bass was tighter, punchier, and far cleaner than stock. Highs were slightly improved, but the lower ranges is where the biggest differences area - especially at louder listening levels. I wasn't really surprised at the improvement I heard, since I knew after opening the cabinet that the speakers were constructed using 0.5" thick MDF - good quality for the price of the speakers though and a beautiful veneer.
I highly recommend this mod for anyone with the AV123 ELT line (classic and 525) and the X-series line, since (I believe) both were constructed of 0.5" thick MDF.
Of course, if you value your time and don't want to go through all the trouble to save 80%, just buy the real No Rez. Btw, if you haven't figured it out already, the cost savings depends a lot on how much surface area you have to cover.
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