Pioneer Tower Tweeter Replacement – SP-FS51-LR

About seven months ago I blew a tweeter in one of my living room towers. The Pioneer Towers were purchased two Christmas’s ago as per a best buy deal. I believe it was buy one tower and get the other tower free. Total cost was about $150 and tax at the time. For my use case this was a great deal. Two floor towers in the living room for TV listening. Awesome. I had no intentions of using these for music listening and movie watching. My initial impressions of the towers was shock. I was really impressed with the clarity and midbass the towers provide. For the price point they are excellent speakers. They are however discontinued now and there is a newer model available. Pioneer had issues with the model I own and discontinued them. You may be able to guess why…the tweeters. Now the speakers are great for my usage and I don’t see a reason to replace them. So a week ago I decided to replace the blown tweeter in my right tower. Why did I wait so long? Well, the imaging on the towers is actually pretty good. Unless I walked up to the tower with the blown tweeter I would not notice a shift in sound. Bass and midbass was still there in both towers and the left towers tweeter was pulling the weight just fine by itself. From a distance, aka the couch, the blown tweeter was negligible. My real problem is that I knew about it.

So I sent an email to Pioneer and to my surprise received a really crap response. I’ve blown tweeters in my Polk Towers (Monitor 70’s) twice. I’ve called up Polk and have received next day replacements. I didn’t even need to send the defective tweeters back. I simply faxed my original receipt and they took care of me. The second time I called in they offered to replace the crossover in the tower to ensure that wasn’t a cause. I told them it most likely is not and that I just enjoy loud music. They still sent replacements. +1000 to Polk. However, this was Pioneers response:

Thank you for contacting Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc.
I’m sorry but we do not have any parts available for these speakers. They are non-repairable.

Sincerely,
*Persons Name*
Parts Sales Representative

Now the point of this post isn’t to bash the sales rep or Pioneer. My towers are entry level speakers with a one year limited warranty. Honestly, I didn’t expect much help to begin with so I didn’t push the issue with support. I left it at that and went on my own. I did a little googling, but could not find direct parts for the Pioneers. I decided to order from the great website Parts Express. They are like the monoprice of components. If you don’t know what monoprice is bookmark this site now too. Quality cables with the best prices MonoPrice. I wired my entire theater’s audio and video with cables from monoprice. Here is the direct link for the tweeters I ordered GoldWood GT520. The tweeters are a 1″ Silk Dome Horn Tweeter in the 4 1/2 body size which work as a direct replacement for the stock Pioneer SP-FS51-LR Towers Tweeters. The screws didn’t exactly line up as you will see below. Wood is wood. They screwed in just fine.

In short, the tweeters arrived after a $20 order. I replaced the old and viola. Below are some photos I took of the process. Note that photo 5 is the old tweeter that was replaced. You will see the ring inside the tweeter where the grill gets inserted. The new tweeter does not have this and therefore the grill does not fit. This is not a big deal at all to me and the speakers look better with the open tweeter showing. If I wanted to get fancy I could bend the grill edges and insert into the cabinet frame. I really don’t see a need for this. However, if I had a two year old with curious fingers you can bet I would be fixing the grill. 🙂

–Austin