DSP Active Crossover

if your your active drivers need impedance flattening, notch filters or if the speaker has baffle step compensation you are fighting an uphill battle trying to use only DSP to address those issues.

@Avanti1960, having built both, I can say this is not at all the case. In all cases, impedance flattening circuits such as a Zobel, increase power required for the sake of making the crossover work closer to an ideal state, like it would with a resistive load. I can categorically state this is completely unnecessary with a DSP based amplifier and crossover. It’s one of the major benefits of designing active speakers that you can ignore the impedance of the drivers.

Another way to say this is that in a passive speaker I only care about impedance flattening because of the effect rises and peaks can have on the frequency response. With DSP, any such issues I can deal with directly in the EQ.  THe point is moot though because with an excellent plate amp the impedance curve of the drivers just doesn't matter (so long as it's high enough).

There are hybrid speakers, which use both active and passive crossovers but I think these are becoming rarer with the common availability of 3-way plate amplifiers. IMHO, and not all speaker designers will feel this way, there’s no upside to a hybrid system if I can go fully active.

The baffle step compensation you reference is a frequency domain issue as well which is quite easily dealt with by a DSP EQ instead of with additional passive components.

Another great advantage for the designer of a fully active instead of a hybrid system is the ability to digitally delay each driver independently and achieve a quasi point source output with high order filters giving you most excellent on and off axis response which you’d have trouble with a hybrid.

The flexibility of a DSP based crossover sometimes causes bad choices though, such as picking bad sounding or poorly matching drivers and then hammering them into shape with EQ, as well as using global EQ to fix bad crossover choices.

You sound ready to take the next step in building speakers, so I really hope you get excited and build some for yoruself soon, either passive or active.

Oh, now that I know @arion is a Trinnov vendor I'll be sure to butter them up whenever I can. 

😂

Hi OP!

If your crossover is that simple then DSP should be fairly straightforward.  The only thing I could imagine you may wish to consider is driver polarity, delay and slopes.

The advantages of DSP include being able to set delay times digitally, and while it may not make a difference for your upper drivers, you can get fine grained phase and polarity matching with your subwoofers.  Also, 4th order slopes may give you better horizontal responses and power handling.

My system is digital only, and my speakers are 3-way, so it’s not particularly complicated.

Hard to say how complicated this will be without knowing your system, and what the passive crossover does.

While setting a DSP crossover is as simple as moving sliders around on your screen, entering the right values is more complicated.

A crossover in a passive speaker is almost never "just" high and low pass slopes, but I suppose crossovers for high efficiency speakers are often close to that.

The real question is how well you are able to analyze the current behavior of your speakers and to make the appropriate adjustments.