Fender Passport 150 Speaker Question -- Help Please?

[Paul Cassone]

The place I work for bought a Passport 150 system for one of the day
programs (we run programs and services for adults with mental
retardation/developmental disabilities).

The Passport worked fine for our purposes for a number of years, but
recently failed.

They asked me to take a look at it, as they brought it to a local tech
who wanted $75 just to look at it. We have had some severe budget cuts
and don't have the money to replace the system.

I discovered pretty fast that the powered mixer section had the power
set to 230 volts. I changed that over to 115 and it appears to work
fine.

The speakers, however, are another issue. I heard something rolling
around in each speaker, and when I disassembled them discovered that
the ceramic magnet assembly in both "top" speakers had come off! They
were apparently originally secured with glue and little locator pins
that were banged with a hammer and a screwdriver to leave a little slot
and broaden them out to hold them in place.

I've never seen anything like this. Any leads on decent replacement
speakers?

These are marked S6-4 6.5" full range driver 4 ohms, max. input 80
watts (I don't believe it).

Thanks for your help.

Paul

[e***@grapevine.net]

Paul Cassone wrote:
<snip>

Post by Paul Cassone
The speakers, however, are another issue. I heard something rolling
around in each speaker, and when I disassembled them discovered that
the ceramic magnet assembly in both "top" speakers had come off!

They

Post by Paul Cassone
were apparently originally secured with glue and little locator pins
that were banged with a hammer and a screwdriver to leave a little slot
and broaden them out to hold them in place.
I've never seen anything like this. Any leads on decent replacement
speakers?
These are marked S6-4 6.5" full range driver 4 ohms, max. input 80
watts (I don't believe it).

We've actually seen that before, more than once. Evidently the Passport
plastic speaker enclosures bounce pretty good (when they're dropped!)

I guess you're inferring looking for an upgrade? No direct help there,
but I would recommend Parts Express first (for potential after market
fits.) FWIW just about any stamped frame PM speaker will give up its'
magnet if dropped hard enough, often enough.

If you're patient, lucky, and the speakers' voice coils/spiders etc
aren't actually damaged, you could potentially work to reattach the
magnets; I've done it before on my own stuff (not customer units!) and
have found silicone (RTV) and two part epoxys to both work
satisfactorily (if the drivers aren't going to get banged around after
'glueing them back together'.) This usually requires some work to
straighten out the basket a bit (from the distortion caused by the
magnets ripping themselves off!), using a ~1 watt 1 Khz test tone
applied to the speaker to monitor for voice coil rub/buzz etc while
fitting the magnet back on...

We've always gone back in with the OEM replacement drivers supplied by
Fender, and cautioned our customers to quit bouncing the cabinets (!
and we've not had a 'second round' on a unit after doing so.)

The Fender part number for the driver is 007-0553-000

Hope this helps,
-Robert
QTS
http://www.Braught.com