For some years now the audio market has been subject to shortages. A common refrains from suppliers are “it’s on the shipping container due in any day”. “New stock due in whenever which is then normally followed up with new due in dates”. “Don’t worry about ordering extra as we have plenty in the pipeline followed up by out of stock AGAIN”!
At least once a year and often twice this is what happens to me with DE-120 drivers. There are not many that will fit in the restricted spaces Klipsch has for tweeters. The DE-120 fits and sounds really good which basically has placed it at the head of the pack for consideration in use with my SMAHL’s.
At least it did until now where I am faced with unhappy customers whose orders I can’t fill because B&C seemingly does not care to produce what their customers would like to buy. It is not just B&C either as this has become the standard operating procedure for other outfits too like Emminence and Dayton and Faital. Even silly old resistors I use for L-Pads run out and stay out for well over a month.
I have had people tell me about the new Celestion CDX1-1412 driver for a while now and actually had a set with curves run on them to compare to the DE-120. They are not just close but almost dead on and those who have had both say either will do just fine. The CDX1 driver gets a little more extension to 20kHz where the DE-120 goes to 18kHz.
I guess I knew I was eventually going down this path as about a month ago I started cutting all clamp plates to allow for the CDX1 driver and discontinued the hole set for the B&C DE-110 driver of which I never had a request for. With the CDX1 drivers I was getting interest. I did have a set of CDX1 drivers for testing a few months back and sold those on to an SMAHL buyer and he was well pleased with them. I have two buyers right now who want them and are waiting for them to be back in stock too. Yeah that’s right, those are out right now with stock due in possible in two or three weeks.
I am working on getting the CDX1-1412 drivers as an option for my customers so one way or another I can sell MAHL’s to them without these pesky twice a year interruptions. All indications are these CDX1 drivers are an admirable alternative to the venerable DE-120.
One of the two purposes for this post today is to see about interest in these from readers and potential buyers. The other is to announce that this is going to happen just not sure when but within a month. Hopefully at that time these silly outages will end. I can say that at least with the CDX1’s there is stock stateside but also a healthy minimum OEM order which I can’t afford right this minute. Once I jump this hurdle driver outages for the SMAHL should be a thing of the past.
Any comments on the CDX1 or hands on experience I would love to hear from you.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 