How good is the crossover in your loudspeakers?
I just watched a Danny Richie YouTube video from three weeks ago (linked below). Danny is the owner/designer of GR Research, a company that caters to the DIY loudspeaker community. He designs and sells kits that contain the drivers and crossover schematics to his loudspeakers, to hi-fi enthusiasts who are willing and able to build their own enclosures (though he also has a few cabinet makers who will do it for you if you are willing to pay them to do so).
Danny has also designed crossovers for loudspeaker companies who lack his crossover design knowledge. In addition, he offers a service to consumers who, while liking some aspects of the sound of their loudspeakers, find some degree of fault in those loudspeakers, faults Danny offers to try to eliminate. Send Danny one of your loudspeakers, and he will free of charge do a complete evaluation of it's design. If his evaluation reveals design faults (almost always crossover related) he is able to cure, he offers a crossover upgrade kit as a product.
Some make the case that Danny will of course find fault in the designs of others, in an attempt to sell you one of his loudspeaker kits. A reasonable accusation, were it not for the fact that---for instance---in this particular video (an examination of an Eggleston model) Danny makes Eggleston an offer to drop into the company headquarters and help them correct the glaring faults he found in the crossover design of the Eggleston loudspeaker a customer sent him.
Even if you are skeptical---ESPECIALLY if you are---why not give the video a viewing? Like the loudspeaker evaluation, it's free.
https://youtu.be/1wF-DEEXv64?si=tmd6JI3DFBq8GAjK&t=1
And for owners of other loudspeakers, there are a number of other GR Research videos in which other models are evaluated.
@gtscott - Only when well engineered. You do make a good point that they are always subtractive, but when done correctly they can be just as accurate as active. People who rip out passive crossovers and just start picking crossover slopes willy nilly do not end up with better products just because they switched. |
Going along with what I mentioned before, the Kef Reference 1 Meta bookshelves are probably a fantastic opportunity for a crossover rethink based on the impedance plots. That speaker may do a lot better with a wider variety of amplifiers than it does now without any significant downgrades. At least that’s my suspicion without having one to disassemble. Anyone want to loan me theirs?? |
The biggest issue I have with this approach is whether or not you wanted the speakers you bought to begin with. If the answer is send it to Danny and have him fix it, you are better off buying a kit from Meniscus or Solen.ca or Madisound since these kits tend to have fewer starter problems to begin with. The only times I really think an upgrade should be done is when the originals have a drop in impedance that can be fixed and keep the original intentions, which is actually do-able. Older Genesis speakers and some Focals can be greatly improved this way. Take a B&W 801 D2 though. There’s a fantastic breakdown of how poorly the tweeter is integrated with the midwoofer... but then look at the fixes, it’s huge and leaves you with something that sounds very different than the 801 you bought in the first place. The 801 is an extreme case, if it was me I’d 100% have thrown out the internal crossover and gone for an active setup instead, but damn those are expensive speakers to fix up. Sometimes it’s worth it for vintage speakers where the tastes of the time are now very different. Troels Gravesen’s Yamaha NS1000 might be an example of that. |
