Air core coils will sound best if you have the signal enter the inside of the foil and exit the outside.....either towards the driver or towards ground. The xover should never be inside the vibrating box. Run the wires out the back and have the xover mounted on damped raised platform.....much easier to upgrade xover with time, as well. The wires to the woofers should be soldered directly to the voice coil wires.......do not go through the binding posts or tabs that are mounted on the driver. Just solder your wire directly to the voice coil wire where it meats its tab. Of course, you do not want distorting binding posts or spades, etc on your speaker wires. You want to hardwire your xover to your speaker wires (the wires from your amp).......or you can use my binding post bypass system for easy connect and disconnect. Less is more. If you have midranges in your speakers.....then hardwire the speaker wire to their voice coil wires, as well.....same with full range drivers....way better sound. Felting around all the tweeters (and midranges) will give a more focused and pure sound. The felt should run right up to the edge of the dome....covering the entire tweeter. All of the speakers I have made or modded all had the above done....always with superior sound.
Millercarbon's Mega Moab Mod Meander
One of the all time great automotive engineers, Norbert Singer, was a key player in every one of the 16 Porsche LeMans victories from 1970 to 1998. His dominance was such that at one point Porsche had won LeMans more than all other marques combined. This was all accomplished by building on the already solid foundation of Porsche production models. The air cooled flat 12 in the 917 was really two flat sixes combined to make 12. This car so dominated motorsport the rules had to be changed to stop it!
So Norbert Singer modified Porsche production technology to extract the absolute most for racing. His legacy is today’s Singer Vehicle Design https://singervehicledesign.com Norbert doesn’t make for a very good car name so they called it Singer. What is a Singer? It is a modified Porsche. It is in essence a hot rod. What Norbert Singer did was make the most hot rod racing Porsche. What Singer does is take that to the next level, capturing every aspect of Porsche right down to excellence of design and aesthetics.
I am not anywhere near the level of Singer. But that is the spirit of what we are doing: taking an already world-class design and hot-rodding it to be even better. Well, better for me anyway- or so we hope!
The early modders started with substituting off the shelf parts to get more power or less weight. That is pretty much all we are doing here. Would be cool if some day people are doing this with a lot more sophisticated approach. Maybe they will. Maybe even I will. For now though we have the current crossover project.
My approach is pretty simple: better parts sound better.
This lesson was learned back in the late 90’s with Linaeum Model 10 speakers. The designer had a new tweeter and told me how to modify the crossover for it. Simple mod, one cap, one resistor. Bought the parts from Radio Shack, put it together, sounded like crap. Absolute horrid crap! Called him up, he said those parts are crap. Said Musicap, Vishay. But they measure the same? Just do it. I did. It worked. Even though they measure exactly the same, the sound difference is off the charts.
Even though they measure exactly the same. There is a lesson here. For those willing to learn.
So this is the essence of it: Eric Alexander has made a speaker the equivalent of a Porsche 911. Even better: an affordable Porsche 911! But after a while with my 911, after learning what makes it drive and feel the way it does, it was only natural to change the shocks and torsion bar and other items to bring out even more of what I like so much about the 911.
That is what we are doing here. Hot-rodding a speaker. Thank you Rick for the metaphor!
The parts are on order. Next week the fun begins!
So Norbert Singer modified Porsche production technology to extract the absolute most for racing. His legacy is today’s Singer Vehicle Design https://singervehicledesign.com Norbert doesn’t make for a very good car name so they called it Singer. What is a Singer? It is a modified Porsche. It is in essence a hot rod. What Norbert Singer did was make the most hot rod racing Porsche. What Singer does is take that to the next level, capturing every aspect of Porsche right down to excellence of design and aesthetics.
I am not anywhere near the level of Singer. But that is the spirit of what we are doing: taking an already world-class design and hot-rodding it to be even better. Well, better for me anyway- or so we hope!
The early modders started with substituting off the shelf parts to get more power or less weight. That is pretty much all we are doing here. Would be cool if some day people are doing this with a lot more sophisticated approach. Maybe they will. Maybe even I will. For now though we have the current crossover project.
My approach is pretty simple: better parts sound better.
This lesson was learned back in the late 90’s with Linaeum Model 10 speakers. The designer had a new tweeter and told me how to modify the crossover for it. Simple mod, one cap, one resistor. Bought the parts from Radio Shack, put it together, sounded like crap. Absolute horrid crap! Called him up, he said those parts are crap. Said Musicap, Vishay. But they measure the same? Just do it. I did. It worked. Even though they measure exactly the same, the sound difference is off the charts.
Even though they measure exactly the same. There is a lesson here. For those willing to learn.
So this is the essence of it: Eric Alexander has made a speaker the equivalent of a Porsche 911. Even better: an affordable Porsche 911! But after a while with my 911, after learning what makes it drive and feel the way it does, it was only natural to change the shocks and torsion bar and other items to bring out even more of what I like so much about the 911.
That is what we are doing here. Hot-rodding a speaker. Thank you Rick for the metaphor!
The parts are on order. Next week the fun begins!
Showing 4 responses by ricevs
I did not like Solen Litz inductors when I tried them. OFC Mundorf Foil inductors were way, way more transparent and extended (both were 12 gauge). Even the type of coating on a litz wire will have a serious effect on the sound. The thicker the coating....the worse the sound. Double coating is really a no no. If you like slow fat veiled sound then Solen's are great. I can see some people will think they are smooth.......and if you have bad electronics then a nice match. |
Microphonics are important. You do no want a loosely wound coil. Mundorf has a newer foil inductor where they use special paper and resin to create an even tighter coil for better sound. https://www.mundorf.com/audio/en/shop/Coils/Air_Coils/MCoil_VLCU/ |
There is not much "info" out there on inductor direction.....pretty esoteric. They measure the same either way and have no "outside foil" like a film cap so most people just do what they want. As a long time serious tweaky listener, I wanted to find out if there was a difference. A friend, who was building his own speakers told me his "crossover guru" said that the best sound was going into the inside. At that time I had never played seriously with inductors.....but was building a three way that used the B&G Neo 10 planar and also the Neo 3 as tweeter. I needed a xover around 3K. I listened both ways to the coil in series with the Neo 10 and it was super clear that the "crossover guru" was correct. I trust my ears. The coil was a .59mh 12 gauge Wax foil coil from Jantzen. Pretty easy for anyone to try this. Listen for yourself. Never trust anyone else. I consider inductors as the worse component in a xover. Really great caps and resistors have very little sound. A .59mh air core inductor has something like 70 or feet of wire/foil. Do you think that 70 feet of OFC wire or foil wound on itself is not a serious veil? I do. My next speaker will not have inductors in series with the midrange or any driver. I am making a stereo amp (one for each channel) for my friends planar panel system. He is using 4 Neo 10s and 12 Neo 3s on an open baffle. Currently he is listening to a coil and cap on the midrange. What I am doing for him is to make a 12 db per octave filter at line level on the input stage of one channel of his modded Purifi amps. By using seriously transparent parts at line level and running the Neo 10s directly from the amp he will have another level of transparency. The Neo 3 tweeters can still be run with the cap/coil combo at speaker lever for very little loss....however, just now thinking it would be best to remove the coil to ground on the tweeter by just having a cap in series with the tweeter and do the second pole of filtering on the input of the tweeter amp.......thereby removing all coils from his speaker......yes, must do this. By the way, a friend has the Lii-Audio Silver 10s (full range drivers) mounted on a 2 foot by 4 foot baffle with one by four wings going straight back. 97 db efficient, flat to 40 hz in his room.....has added ESS AMT on top with copper foil cap for slightly more air. Bypassed the binding posts on the speaker so his speaker wire is soldered to the voice coil wire. He is in heaven. Total cost is around $2.5K......four drivers, wood and 2 copper foil caps. Mind blowing sound. He is going to add 2 15 inch custom open baffle woofs on each side to add some serious slam......running off Pass active xover with solid state class A amp for the woofs. My next speaker will be something like this. |