Paradigm Atom v2 Speaker Repair

I have owned various speakers over many year, and I guess I still have most of them.

These Paradigm Atom v2 "bookshelf" speakers I once used used in a kitchen. I think Bill Clinton was President when I got these... Good speakers! These sounded great for their compact size. But they sat idle for a few years, after I moved. More recently I started using them in my workshop.

They seemed to be working fine. A year or two went by, then one of them started sounding pretty bad, particularly on the bass end. Turns out I had the dreaded old-foam problem that seems, eventually, to claim all speakers. Needing speakers though, I decided to research fixing the issue.

Pretty much all stereo style speakers are made the same way. There's a metal frame, a cone made of plastic or paper with the coil attached, and a soft foam surround that supports the cone in the frame. 

At some point this foam surround simply decays and literally turns to dust. Time alone does this. When it happens the cone rubs of the frame, particularly on loud sounds and bass and generally sounds terrible.

What I did not know until I looked into it, is that this is actually pretty easy to fix, by replacing the foam surround.

I bought a repair kit online. I want to say it was like $15? It includes two surrounds (because if one is gone you know the other is about to be), a specialized glue, and instructions. The repair kit is specifically for these speakers with the exact parts used originally. You can get these for almost any speaker, turns out.

Here is the inside of the speaker, back removed and a chunk of padding taken out. I guess on some of these speakers that padding is fiberglass insulation that can be a mess to handle. Mine however was a more conventional foam like you might find stuffing a pillow. It was no problem.

The trouble here is with the larger speaker. It comes right out, unplugging the wires (I took this photo to remember which is which) and removing 4 screws.

Just some gentle pulling on the surround causes it to fall completely to pieces. It's easy to see the problem here...

I removed all the old foam, and cleaned the edges of the plastic cone and the metal frame with isopropyl alcohol to remove any residue of the original glue.

First I glued the cone to the new surround, let that sit, then the new foam to the frame.

There's a couple tricks to getting it all even and the cone centered that I saw both online and in the instructions that came with this stuff. But overall, the job was remarkably simple. The glue gives just the right amount of time to get things in place before it starts getting really sticky.

How did I never know how easy this repair is? This speaker is literally as good as new!

It made me want to go out and find some old high end speakers discarded for having this issue. 

Reassembled, the speaker worked great! But now I can definitely hear the beginnings of that rattle in the other one. No surprise there. I'll do my other speaker too.