Speaker (high-ish end) Repair/replacement options/eBay Scenario

Hello all, I'll be dual-posting this on the Music Board as well, and I'm not really sure which group of posters would be the better one to answer this. There's a handful of audio/cinephiles around here. And a fair number of handy folks as well who may know a thing or two about speakers.


I just bought a used B&W HTM Matrix (800-series center channel from a few generations ago) off ebay. Long story short, it came with a dead tweeter (literally no sound from tweeter when amped, identical tweeter from 803m puts out sound. It's not the crossover, the problem is isolated to the tweeter. And, if not obvious from the other tweeter putting out sound, the correct set of terminals is amped (bi-wire/bi-amp terminals). I paid $325 for the 17-year old speaker. The replacement tweeter is listed at $362 from B&W. It's not listed anywhere else. There is one site who mentions they have one in stock but doesn't have a price. The seller is on top of his game- he's apologized, offered to pay for a reasonable replacement/repair. And he's even contacted that store that I mentioned.

Now, I did go ahead and pull it apart after noticing the price of just a new diaphragm was $50. The original diaphragm had a small dent that was easily pressed back out. The cabling all seems to be in place and terminated on both ends (molex on the plug side, terminated in an unusual push-on connector on the other end. The coil did have a single loose loop of copper that I went ahead and placed back around the loop. The magnet...well, it worked just fine. There were no obvious defects other than the small dent in the metal-coned diaphragm.

My questions:
1) Does this sound like it's a diaphragm vs coil issue?
2) Repairing the diaphragm for $50 (his) is easy and within the realm of what I'm willing to do. A coil, however, is well beyond what I'm willing to try to rebuild/repair. Will a stereo shop recoil a speaker? And, more importantly, will they do this kind of repair for anything significantly under $360? My guess is that he's probably willing to put up $50-100. For the sake of it already being here in my house and the cost/effort to ship it back, I'd probably be willing to put up another ~$50 of my own.
3) Am I an idiot and missing something? I'm positive the tweeter isn't functioning and the box's internal path is fine. There are no obvious signal path disruptions in the tweeter itself. But am I forgetting a fairly obvious reason why two separate identical tweeters would work, but the one that shipped with it didn't? Is there anything else I should try? I don't have a way to measure voltages or resistances on the speaker.
4) Anyone know of a reputable repair shop that won't cost me > the cost of a new tweeter (Heck, I could actually buy another one of these for $290 before dropping $360 on a new tweeter.) anywhere between ~Houston-NOLA? I travel that corridor pretty frequently and wouldn't mind a trip anywhere there for repairs.

Any advice appreciated. I'll be checking back in later on in the morning.








I knew I should've stuck with the 2.0 setup instead of this 5.0 nonsense. The things I do for off-axis movie-viewers I love...