Hi guys, i'm new to this forum but have looked in from the outside for awhile now....have been looking for speakers for some time and somehow got obsessed with fortes. they are hard to get your hands on....one day i asked my sister ( she goes garage saling ) to keep her eyes open for speakers.Two weeks later i get a call from her to come se some speakers. I figured it was a wild goose chase but went anyway. Son of a gun if i don't run into a set of fortes...picked th em up for 200.00. I figured it must be an omen....anyway here i am. The cabinet is in great shape....horns are good...rear woofers good...but i need replacement front woofers. previous owner changed 1 woofer with odd one and the one original woofer sounds gravelly. Also any thoughts on how to freshen these would be great( daiphrams,caps,gaskets etc.). I'm really excited with these and hope you can help. They are i think 1985....don't have serial#s on the back sun must have bleached them off...insp. by charles dixon-tstd. by vanessa horton....has sq. or rect. connection port and that is where i found 1985. I can hear the potential for a top quality set of speakers even with the issues. thanks for any and all help .....boy have i got alot to learn....THANKS AGAIN

 Bob Crites (BEC on this Forum) can set you up or give you some good advice...popbumper, DeanG and Al Klappenberger too...

http://critesspeakers.com/autotransformers.html

Bill

Jesse,

Congrats on the Forte's. Very cool sister, too.

It wouldn't hurt to call Klipsch parts, 800 number somewhere on the main Klipsch.com links. They can tell you what it would cost for replacements. Not too likely that they would have the original woofer still in stock, but they can probably recommend an appropriate substitute.

There are other forum members with the knowledge to make suggestions to locate complementary substitutes. Might even be that the odd woofer would be OK with a mate of the same make.

You should be able to get the right woofers in there and not spend a lot of money.

The very cool looking things on the back that look like woofers are actually "passive radiators". It is clever engineering used in some speakers as an alternative to having bass ports on the cabs. They PR's are designed to have the proper mass, stiffness, and other characteristics so that they are finely tuned to let just the right amount of bass into the room.