New speakers for my system


I am currently running a bi-amped system comprised of a pair of 360° dispersion transmission lines that are tuned to 17Hz and a pair of 2 ways using Scanspeak Ti HF and 6" full range drivers. The 2 ways are crossed over at 4k with 2nd order Butterworths.
I am driving them all with a pair of Classé strereo amps. The crossovers to each amp are via a DSP.
The plan is to eliminate the 2 ways and replace them with a better imaging pair of something that will not require digital filtration but will only see the digital crossover. The crossover can be at a low enough frequency, perhaps 100Hz, so there will be no significant time alignment issues caused by the digital circuitry.

Another option would be to bi-amp a single pair and replace both speaker pairs. This is hard to justify since the T-Ls are pretty effective. In fact I’ve needed to roll them off at 25Hz. They use a pair of the old Focal kevlar cone drivers (8".)
Maybe some time-aligned D’Appolito configuration?
areed622

Showing 4 responses by areed622

The Jordans look like an excellent solution. They may solve my rooms asymmetricality issue and will likely mate well with my T-lines. 
Thanks for the suggestion!

Thank you for your suggestion. I am a bit apprehensive about using ribbon drivers for several reason:
Firstly, my listening room is asymmetrical with one side with a partial corner thus being likely problematic;
Secondly, the size of the Magnepans will be difficult to deal with;
Thirdly, I’ve used ribbons in the past and found them to be somewhat difficult loads to deal with. They tend to be rather inefficient and must therefore handle very high currents since their actual impedance is very low on the ribbon side of the transformer.
I think I’d like to stick with more traditional drivers.
What are your thought regarding Vandersteen 3a signatures?
I’ve been real busy with work so this is the first time I’ve had to catch up on this thread. Thank you all for your suggestions. Update:
Just repositioned my mid-highs to more closely align with both the vertical and time axis of the TLs. WAY BIG improvement very largely affected my raising the altitude of the HF drivers so they’re slightly above ear level.
I need to remeasure the system. This time instead of relying on FFT and impulse exclusively I will look at both pulse and triangle waveforms as well which should help reveal transient response issues when differentially viewed on a scope.
Re-examining the current filtration reveals a suspicious boost applied around the digital x-over point, most likely a phase issue since Fourier addition should require a cut there and not a boost.
Next I plan to re-EQ the system so all filtration happens below 400Hz and there is no time delay applied. If that further improves things I’ll design a 2 or 3 way that will be time aligned with the TLs and will work from 150 or 200 Hz on up.
Currently looking at SEAS MCA15RCY (to be rolled off below 150 or 200Hz and up to 2k or so) to couple with Dynaudio D28 up to 4.5k then use either my 3/4 Ti or Vifa tweeters on up. The Markaudios would likely get smoked pretty quickly due to low power handling (30w) coupled with fairly low efficiency (~88dB spl @ 1w.)
I plan to try to keep the passive filtration to 1st order BW and non-inductive resistors as needed to eliminate x-over induced phase error.
All digital filtration will be on the low-end exclusively so as to completely eliminate any digital delay blurring of the image.
Another more expensive option would be use the TLs from 25 to 200 Hz, the SEAS from 200 to 4k (angled at 20°,) and Eton 26HD3s on up.