Real or Fake Alpine?

[mfenske]

What say the group-are these legit?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/pair-alpine...sAAOSwUKxYc-nE

[Weigel21]

They were never really confirmed as to being "good" knock-offs or being built by the same build house as the originals, just with a different Alpine logo on the mesh and no mounting hardware.

From what I have heard/seen claimed, they are in all regards, the same tweeter. Still, for as well as they performed, they didn't like being crossed below 3.5kHz, IIRC, which made them difficult to integrate into a 2-way system.

[Hillbilly SQ]

They seemed to sound fine when I heard them and others who ran them said the same. I'd consider them as a 3-way tweeter on the cheap. 2-way tweeter...not a chance.

[mfenske]

Aren't these supposed to be the ones that came in the Polk SR6500?

[Weigel21]

I want to say I do believe these eBay Alpine tweeters were sold with the old Type-x components from years ago, such as the Alpine SPX-17REF. As you can see though, there is no mounting nut included though. Back on DIYMA, a member spoke of using PVC end caps which they fit snuggly inside and made pillar pods from them.

[Lanson]

Its the tweeter from the SPX-17Pro component set. The REF set used a tweeter much smaller, though it too was a ring-radiator. The REF setup came first for me, then the PRO's. The REF's in an Altima in ~2006, and the PRO's in ~2008.

Anecdotally, I did major damage to the REF set. The woofer collapsed at some point and the cone creased, I think made possible by getting the cone wet in the door. The passive crossover also melted down due to the light bulb resistor inside, and me being younger, dumber, and louder. The REF set is recognizable by the wooly cone (kind a like the F#1 Status stuff way back), and its tweeter is a smaller ring radiator with the center nib of the ring actually protruding out from the tweeter grille. Made it fairly easy to aim the tweeter.

The SPX-17PRO set was nicer. The tweeter became one of my favorite, though the woofer had a honky hollowness to it that, without powerful DSP, was useless. The passive crossover was more advanced but I was active with a Kenwood X4R at the time. Anyway, the "knockoff" set thread was mine at DIYMA. I still do not know how these tweeters ended up in the hands of this guy that sells them, and they aren't identical to the ones Alpine sold in their SPX-17PRO set, but they are damn, damn close. It is quite a mystery. I have several sets of the knockoffs and I've installed a few of them. They do need crossed aggressively, because they don't like to play low. Other than that, fantastic tweeter. That behavior was also the case of the original ones.

[Weigel21]

I stand corrected on which tweeter this is a copy of, thanks Lanson. I knew it was one of the old Type-x component sets, but got which one it was a copy of wrong. Need to figure out how to edit my post to cross out the incorrect model number.

[Lanson]

Its not a big deal. The REF was just a predecessor.

This PRO tweeter fits like OEM in Dodge and Jeep vehicles. So does the Audiofrog GS/GB10