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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. 

 

 

bdp24

Showing 1 response by lemonhaze

lemonhaze
432 posts
 

@bdp24, my condolences. You are a brave chap attacking peoples' cheapo crossovers! What nerve? March onwards with the torch held high.

Why the Danny haters? Except for the uber expensive just about every XO can be improved. The parts quality can almost always be improved and there are those who will argue that a cap can not improve the sound and if it measures to spec and voltage rating it's good enough, don't fix summin that ain't broke. To those I say, you are quite right, no cap can improve the sound but I choose caps that do less damage. All components will degrade the sound.

An example: I built a pair of Zigmahornets that use the little fostex FE103 full range speaker. Zero XO but had no bass, it's only about 4". Can't get more bass so I tamed the mids down with a parallel coil, cap and resistor in one leg. This is not a XO as such just merely knocking the mids and top end down a little and did indeed provide more 'apparent bass' but it was soon tossed out because it killed the life of the otherwise great little thing.

That's what components do. Take the much vaunted LS3/5A BBC monitor with 2 dozen components to force the response to be smooth but to exhibit the famous/notorious BBC 'smile' so a little tilted up in the bass and top end, hence the smile. These were engineered for mobile recording studios where the speakers were about a foot from their face.  I just hear them as dynamically constipated.

I design speakers and place importance on accurate phase tracking at XO and if the drive units are chosen carefully with smooth roll off out of band then a simple XO will work and work well without excessive editorialization. Some manufacturers boast about how they have with many components achieved a flat response but get them home and the measured in-room response is anything but flat!

One of the worst offenders is the ubiquitous sand cast resistor, most of them with magnetic ends.

Now if you don't believe that a resistor can change sound for the worse then here is a cheap experiment:

Cheap experiment:  Most tweeters have an attenuation resistor in series ranging from 2 to 10 ohms, it doesn't matter. Lets say it is 4.7ohms, remove it and replace it with a string of 10 white abominations of 0.47 ohms soldered in series = 4.7 ohms, right? How do things sound now? But, but, but, yeah now you sound like a cheap Chinese two-stroke:

 

 

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