Dayton blows out shielded drivers, farks up lots of great designs....

One look at my site and it's easy to see that I like Dayton drivers. They offer a great value for the money, and Parts Express has always steadfastly stood behind them. So it's taken me as a bit of a surprise when, over the course of a few days, they silently introduced new unshielded versions of their popular drivers while simultaneously clearing out the shielded drivers at bargain-basement prices. For the most part, the drivers went fast, too! (As the saying goes, "Someone must have backed a truck up to the warehouse. Expect to see them on eBay soon for 300% markup.")

But here's the frustrating part: the new unshielded versions of the drivers do differ in spec somewhat from the old ones... not by a tremendous amount, but enough that box tuning will have to change a bit based on new Thiele/Small specs. The verdict's still out on how different the impedance curves will be, and if they will require adjustments in the crossover. I'm especially concerned with this on drivers like the RS180 and RS150, which--in my opinion--require a lot of finesse in the crossover. In my experience, they can go go from "obnoxious" to "awesome" by changing a filter component by 20%.

Bottom line: will the unshielded drivers work as "drop in" replacements for the shielded ones in my designs (Sunflowers, Amiga, Ipanema, Aethers, etc.) and all the other kick-ass Dayton-based designs out there? We won't know until the designers get to measure them in-cab and try them with the existing XO. I personally have no plans of going out and buying shielded versions of all my RS drivers--I'm perfectly happy with the ones I have. So I either have to move all my Dayton shielded designs to the NLA section, or update them if someone is willing to send/lend me the new unshielded versions of the drivers.