Quote:
Originally posted by bestbang4thebuck:

Beyond a division of frequencies, do the crossovers you made contain any significant 'voicing' and, if so, did you work from a circuit already designed for the drivers you were using, work it out on your own or ???
Yup...

All the "voicing" was arrived at over considerable time by ear, and listening to many, many recordings. Even now however, I can easily adjust the HF to suit certain recordings.

The crossover it's self has no frequency response altering capability.

The output of the crossover which goes to the woofers is routed through an active 1/3rd octave equalizer which more than anything corrects for some weirdness in my room in the vicinity of 200Hz.

The crossover to the HF horn is at 500Hz (they're designed to operate down to this frequency) to allow the single horn to cover as much of the audio range as possible. Having a single diaphram and horn cover such a large range aids tremendously in creating a coherent wavefront.

In the crossover's HF output is placed a line level passive shunt L-C-R variable Q filter with two fixed frequencies which were chosen by experiment and listening. The amount of impact the EQ has can be varied by two potentiometers, one for each filter frequency, which varies the depth of the notch and the filter Q.

Now before somebody squauks about my use of a passive filter, I must point out that there is a world of difference between a line level passive filter like I'm using and a speaker level passive filter (crossover). Line level passive filters are noiseless and distortionless, which is why I went this route. The passive filter guarantees that no electronic degredation will take place in the equalization stage.

Speaker level passive filters (as in crossover networks) produce all kinds of distortions because the filter is it's self driving a reactive element (the speaker driver). Additionally, because of the high voltage and currents involved in a passive speaker level crossover, it is extremely, if not impossible, to find parts of the quality and precision that can be used at the much lower voltages and currents of a line level passive filter.