@grislybutter
I can cook great, but baking requires too much accuracy for me. @mahgister still took offence due to my previous comments about headphones. Anyway you can enjoy music is fine by me. Music lovers and audiophiles are two separate groups although you can be both. Believe it or not I know audiophiles who are not music lovers. They are sound lovers. Most music lovers are not audiophiles (Thank God).
If you are building your own loudspeakers you are most definitely a true audiophile in the best sense.
Magister, you are over analyzing me. I am a simpleton, a rather rude one. Blame my parents.
@kraftwerkturbo
254 Hz is middle C! 350 Hz is well into the mid range. RAISE THE CROSSOVER POINT for the subwoofer. Get it around 100 Hz and you will improve your speaker's headroom dramatically. If you are using one subwoofer 100 Hz might be a problem. If you can locate the sub by ear the best solution is a second subwoofer. If you can not do that drop the crossover point one step at a time until you can not locate it. This also assumes you are using a high pass filter on the main speakers.
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To get a truly large lifelike presentation you need a line source loudspeaker like a Magneplanar , ribbon or electrostatic speaker. All these other speakers are point source which have an inherently microscopic sound stage, even the larger ones. Go Listen to Magneplanars. They are the best value.
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@kraftwerkturbo
You want Magnepan 3.7i or better. I do not like Martin Logan ESLs. The curved panel is a problem for any number of reasons. Sound Labs makes a much better ESL and you can get them in 8 or 9 foot tall versions which will fit to most ceilings forming line sources down to 1 Hz!
Speaker placement depends on the room. You need to put sound absorption at every first reflection point.
An excellent modern LS3 5A is the Harbeth P3. I recently set up a system with them crossing to subwoofers at 100 Hz. As we say in America, they kick ass!
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The best imaging is very hard to achieve. It is impossible in some rooms. The speakers have to be in symmetrical identical environments and have to have identical frequency response curves from 100 Hz to 12 kHz. This is difficult to achieve without digital signal processing. There can not be any serious phase aberrations and all drivers have to be time aligned. Full range loudspeakers with subwoofers are the best way to achieve this. The fewer analog crosses the better. Digital crossovers are better but rare. There is only one preamp that has them and that is the DEQX Pre 8. There are commercial dBx DriveRacks that could easily be used in a home system. Sanders uses one with his Model 10 loudspeaker.
Coming up with an entirely analog system that images at the state of the art is a matter of sheer luck. I use to sell and install systems in a previous life and I have heard only two such systems do it. It also requires the right live recordings. With studio recordings image "depth" is a matter of how much echo is applied. I view studio recordings as a different form of art, fun in it's own right, surrealistic.
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@mahgister
I think you should just stick to headphones.
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@kraftwerkturbo
You might take a second to look at the way the woofer is mounted, from behind.
In order to get it in or out you have to have a removable panel, Since the speakers are typically mounted on stands and you can see around them what better place to put the panel, under the grill cloth. The people who like to keep a grill off do not appear to mind the look of screws. Exactly why they decided to use a woofer that had to mounted this way you would have to ask Harbeth. They are British and have a reason for everything.......be it nonsensical or not. They did invent the LP12 a device that could rip the heart out of any audiophile. On the other hand Adrian Newey is British and the greatest race car designer that ever lived.
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@kraftwerkturbo
Yes, it is unusual, but the British are unusual. I can say that the P3's construction is first class using the best materials. I have never seen tighter miters.
@grislybutter
I did not mean it to be harsh at all. He is concerned about crosstalk. Headphones are the best way to defeat it.
I think building your own speakers is a wonderful thing to do. There are hundreds of excellent drivers available, your computer gives you the power to make important measurements and digital signal processing makes time alignment and phase accurate crossovers a breeze. I know exactly what I would do for dynamic speakers. Unfortunately, I am an ESL junky. All I have left to do is the subwoofers and they are the hardest enclosure to get right.
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@kraftwerkturbo ,
I thought you were using outboard subwoofers, crossed at 50 Hz? No you do not want to mess with a speakers internals. My point is asking a driver that is handling 350 Hz to do 20 Hz caused the driver to Doppler distort a most sensitive part of the midrange. The inflection point over which Doppler distortion is not noticeable seems to be 100 Hz in my estimation dealing with electrostatic speakers. Distortion is more noticeable with these speakers.
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Do you have more choices of crossover points? With one subwoofer you can not go as high as 100 Hz because it will allow you to localize the sub which is not good. You have to use at least two subs. But, you can probably take it as high as 80 Hz if the slope is 18 dB/oct or steeper. The other thing you do not want is a sub getting into your midrange.
The less distortion the speaker creates the better the image. I think the stage is a more a matter of the recording, it most definitely changes with recordings from "in your face" to Symphony Orchestra wide, front row to back of the theater. The image is also recording dependent, but there is certainly a system element. Some systems can image others are more vague about it. The key is less distortion, phase aberrations and finally the frequency response curves of both channels need to be identical. This last part is not so easy to do. You have to be able to measure both channels (always a good thing to do) then you have to be able to modify those curves. Very few systems have the ability to do that effectively. Plain PEQ will not work. You have to be able to draw target curves which means more advanced digital signal processing.
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@riccitone
You are absolutely right. I have set up systems with LS3 5As on stands with subwoofers and blind folded you would think you were listening to much larger speakers. They also image better than many larger speakers and there is less enclosure coloration. You have to run the subs up to 100 Hz to get the best effect which requires very steep cutoffs.
There is one issue I think you need to think about. The ability to move "fast" determines a driver's high frequency limit. Most subwoofer drivers run easily up to 500 even 1000 Hz. 100 Hz is never a problem. The larger the driver the slower (shorter excursion) it has to move to produce the same frequency at identical volumes which is why larger drivers have less distortion and frequently better transient response, just the opposite of what many people think. The same is true for multiple drivers as it is really a surface area thing. To make really accurate and powerful low bass IMHO you need at least two 15" or four 12" drivers in most average size rooms. I use eight 12" drivers. Above 15" the cone becomes more difficult to control. I have seen strobe films of 18" drivers moving in some wild ways, anything but pistonic. I would use Eight 15" drivers but the size of enclosure required would not work in my room.
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@riccitone
A second sub will do a whole lot. The only limitation on subwoofer size and numbers is the room you have for them. There are excellent drivers available today that can operate in very small enclosures, you just need more power. I advise against open baffle subwoofers. I tried that approach as I have been using open baffle speakers (ESLs) since 1978-9. The thought was that it would match them better. It was a mess. The wavelengths are too long. Subwoofers are omnidirectional and the out-of- phase waves cancel in an unpredictable pattern literally canceling out some notes. Today with digital crossovers and time alignment it is a breeze to match subs perfectly. One subwoofer is always a mistake, it is putting your bass in prison. The minimum for a point source system is two. Open baffle speakers by all means, but not the subwoofers.
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@tomic601
I have been down that route. I now only build stuff I know I can do better than anything commercially available and I can not do better than Sound Labs although I have made some modifications. Nothing spectacular. I added a second set of inputs so I can drive the high frequency transformer separately and bypassed all of the controls.
I installed Beverages in two systems back in 1980 or so, the tall Round Towers with Mark Levinson equipment, Tandberg tape decks and LP12s. Fine systems for the day. I never met Harold but I knew Jim Strickland of Acoustat well. I ran 2+2s for decades.
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@kraftwerkturbo
The Sonus Fabers are the best of that group. I compared the LS50 Meta directly with the Harbeth P3 and there was no comparison. The Harbeth was significantly better. My son in law bought the Harbeths and built two 12" subs from Dayton kits.
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