High Efficiency Speaker Asylum

Posted by nl (A) on February 11, 2007 at 18:24:06

In Reply to: Fun Stuff--Quick Questions posted by Dr Deville on February 11, 2007 at 15:58:39:

The XO is a Behringer non-digital model, the CX2200 or something like that. You can get them on eBay for less than $100. They are XLR only so you have to make your own RCA-XLR cables, which is easy.

I'm referring to line-level passive. Actually I already made a PLLXO for a 100hz cutoff, but I haven't been using it because it's for 100K input and my amps are 10K. Actually the present amps are inverted chip amps, and I'm not so sure about using filtering before an inverted stage. Maybe it's OK.

I didn't try going higher than 200hz, but I don't think I'd want to. It's fun to play with an active XO because you can do things like mute out individual drivers and listen to what is coming through each driver. 200hz seems like a natural cutoff between bass information (drums and bass) and midrange -- vocals and lead instruments etc. Maybe 300hz would be OK too. But you can really tell why the 800hz-1200hz range is dangerous. You're really splitting the sound in half, with the fundamentals of vocals and lead instruments coming from one driver and the overtones from another. Put it this way -- you can listen to the FRs crossed at 200hz and enjoy the music, but listening to the Altecs crossed at 800hz produces just noise.

As for the "grunge" I was mainly referring to the problems of a crossover in the sensitive voice range. After all, I was using the same XO at a lower point for the FRs as well. However, the XO itself adds a lot of electronic grunge to the sound.

Anyway, I tried 200hz at it was a nice compromise between freeing up the FR by cutting out the bass and preserving the FR cohesive sound.