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.
I ripped out my passive crossovers in my Magnepan 20.1 and have an active crossover from Danville Signal Processing using the DSP Nexus 2x8 and apply room correction and time alignment via 12 biquads per channel. The results are stunning. Why bother with the passive components at all when you can do it digitally processing all 8 channels at 192kHz/24bit and get all the power of the amps directly into the speakers. It’s simply fantastic. Thanks, Steve |
@russbutton Awesome detail, I wish more people understood how critical it is to learn how to use and active crossover to get the best out of the music, speakers, amps, and the room. I was an early adopter of the dspNexus from Danville Signal Processing and it is the first DSP to operate 8 channels at 192kHz/24bit and you can custom design the crossover with Audio Weaver. Design it to be as simple or as complicated as you like such as any traditional slope or go crazy with biquads like me generated through Room EQ Wizard and Multi Sub Optimizer. thanks, Steve |
