RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs

Posted by rick_m (A) on August 5, 2014 at 09:09:20

In Reply to: RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs posted by Rob_Jones on August 4, 2014 at 12:02:31:

"placing a 100ohm damping resistor across the tweeter terminals will also help to tone down and smooth out a harsh/lively treble. 100 ohms is a starting point"

I like your advice...

Taking a broadband (RF) view of the system, once your tweeters unload you end up with essentially an open cable which of course will have multiple resonances excited by HF energy from the PA and local sources of energy. Putting a resistive load at the speaker end that matches the cable's characteristic impedance can tame the reflections both in and out of band.

My experience is that the "better" your cables are in the sense of having less dielectric absorption the worse they will be in a mismatched system. And home audio is nothing-but. This can have the paradoxical effect of rewarding poor cable performance. A low-loss cable with a conjugate match at the load end is the best of both worlds for both the interconnects and the speakers.

I just use resistors, the peak/average power in home audio is so high that even a few watt resistor at the speaker will do it especially since you want to match the Zo of the cable, not the output impedance of the power amplifier. Matching the interconnects is trickier since the Zo of the source is often similar to the cable impedance. I cheat and use 300ohm open lines along with build-out resistors. One can probably pull it off with RC networks at the load and no build-out but I don't have any experience with it.

Thanks for the interesting post.

Rick

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Follow Ups Full Thread

Topic - Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - beppe61 06:09:04 07/31/14 (13)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - Rob_Jones 14:05:19 08/03/14 (12)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - beppe61 10:14:10 08/04/14 (11)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - Rob_Jones 11:57:02 08/04/14 (10)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - beppe61 22:53:29 08/04/14 (6)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - Rob_Jones 00:48:32 08/05/14 (5)

" fitting a damping resistor across the tweeter terminals " - beppe61 01:48:15 08/05/14 (4)

RE: " fitting a damping resistor across the tweeter terminals " - Rob_Jones 01:52:42 08/05/14 (3)

RE: " fitting a damping resistor across the tweeter terminals " - beppe61 05:47:57 08/05/14 (2)

RE: " fitting a damping resistor across the tweeter terminals " - Rob_Jones 09:02:58 08/05/14 (1)

RE: " fitting a damping resistor across the tweeter terminals " - beppe61 10:59:45 08/06/14 (0)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - loftarasa 12:11:00 08/04/14 (0)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - Rob_Jones 12:02:31 08/04/14 (1)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - rick_m 09:09:20 08/05/14 (0)

Follow Ups

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs - rick_m 09:09:20 08/05/14 (0)

RE: Any experience of smooth sounding XLRs

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