09/19/2026
These early 70s Yamaha NS-690 speakers came in that were actually paired with the previous CR-2020 I restored. Client wanted something clear and punchy and took that into consideration on the build.
Woofer was simple, upgrading the old NPE cap to a nice Nichicon MUSE. Mids were a bit trickier as the stock layout had a narrow 18uf lytic, so I played a bit of musical chairs with the parts here. The large 3.5uf big silver Nichicon (mid shunt) got moved into an open slot on the lower part of the board where it should have been the entire time (now a Jantzen Cross-Cap), and the open bracket fit perfectly for a Jantzen Standard Z-Cap handling the mid signal in series.
The tweeter had an old stock mylar film 2.5uf cap, and in this case I wanted things to be dead accurate so I combined a 1uf Z-Cap with a ClarityCap 1.5uf ESA series - combing for a 2.46 and 2.47uf per speaker, near perfect balance. This required drilling and additional hole in the board to install, instead of trying some messy piggyback .The Z/ESA caps in parallel blended the smooth, full-bodied midrange of the ClarityCap ESA with the speed, transparency, and top-end air of the Jantzen Z-Cap.
The end result was a highly resolving restored set of speakers, with a forward midrange attack and excellent high frequency articulation. Mission accomplished.
