the best would be ridiculous claim.In several big audio shows, Linkwitz's speakers have been demoed along with other super expensive commercial speakers and many thought that the Linkwitz's DIY speaker is one of (or even) the best...
Commercial speakers tend to be better designed but with lower quality drivers. So low quality drivers and high quality design (i.e. commercials) versus high quality drivers and low quality design (i.e. DIY). In general, design wins over drivers, hence, commercials win over DIY...
But the PROBLEM is, nobody has a clear idea of what a "good" speaker is
There are too many tastes.... and there are too many bad ears... And if the knowledge is bad, it is impossible to compare speakers in different non-optimum (or non-matching) systems...
but the orion is def excellent. here its been compared to revel salon 2 https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/a-weekend-with-the-linkwitz-orion.72264/
The "Bad Person" is back! Long time my friend, hope you've been well. Jeff, are there any new projects that you'd care to share?
Nothing new at my end I'm sad to say, other than rusting away from all the rain.
Best Regards,
Terry
Did some bipole/dipole (depending on wiring) waveguide coaxials- basically a 12" waveguide machined into front and rear baffles, open to the sides, with a 8" JBL coaxial front and back. Also working with some peerless compression drivers- they're VERY good drivers, smooth and extended. On the amp front, I will be tossing together some NCore500 soon, I have NC400 running now, these will be for biamping and/or surround. To go with that I'll be doing a remote control balanced pre, another putzeys design.
In several big audio shows, Linkwitz's speakers have been demoed along with other super expensive commercial speakers and many thought that the Linkwitz's DIY speaker is one of (or even) the best...
Commercial speakers tend to be better designed but with lower quality drivers. So low quality drivers and high quality design (i.e. commercials) versus high quality drivers and low quality design (i.e. DIY). In general, design wins over drivers, hence, commercials win over DIY...
But the PROBLEM is, nobody has a clear idea of what a "good" speaker is
There are too many tastes.... and there are too many bad ears... And if the knowledge is bad, it is impossible to compare speakers in different non-optimum (or non-matching) systems...
The bad the good... psychology parallaxes are not my cup of tea.
I'm a pragmatic autodidactic modest technician with a small bad sounding room.
All the commercial loudspeakers i've tested are catastrophic in my room, even the orion are very bad in a such little volume very close to the walls.
A specific loudspeaker driver parameter selection with a specific room coupling at the right problematic frequency range is unbeatable, i'm very impressed by the sonic result, it surpassed my expectations by far.
It is certainly not better than big commercial loudspeakers in a large good sounding room but it is vastly supperior in a bad room...
By very very far, simply by drastically reduced resonnances (thanks to the adapted mecanical coupling) than DRC and expensive speakers are unable to cure... even with 10K€ of standardized gear.Sure. According to you and me. But people really have different ears and tastes. Most people even do not have a "right" to make a judgement.
That's what I'm talking about. Everyone have their own views. And it's a very complicated matter. VERY complicated.
This is a debate comparing apples to oranges in some regards, the act of buying a commercial speaker and building your own are two very different acts.
While they both result in a finished speaker, the perception of the final users are very different.
Commercial speakers are manufactured, there are economies of scale that allow them to do more with less cost, there are also tremendous overhead costs that need to be factored into the final price.
The DIYer trades all that for spending their own time which usually no cost is attributed. However those un-ledgered costs are converted into a sense of immense satisfaction at the work, process, learning and solutions created during that process.
Both can ultimately result in good sounding speakers, in both cases the user spending $3k will be convinced theirs is the best, conversely the user who spent weeks designing and building will feel the same way. Both are ultimately right.
Recently my "PS2" speakers consisting of $600 in Peerless and Satori drivers and passive crossovers completely trounced a set of $2k Genelec studio monitors, wasn't even close, but I imagine the Genelec's used about $100 in drivers and they obviously had other compromises as well.
Commercial loudspeakers also have to make compromises to meet their profit requirements, speaker designers at these companies are rarely allowed to build a speaker exactly how they'd like with the quality of components that they'd prefer, so ultimately they do the best with the budget and resources that are available.
The DIYer will make compromises on cabinet or finish quality and aesthetics, but can spend more money on higher end drivers since very few other costs are accounted for. The crossover, tuning and enclosure are big areas where the DIYer can make or break the effort.
IMO I am a DIYer and don't ever see myself buying a commercial loudspeaker, but I do understand why others do and should. Ultimately this is a choice each person should make for themselves.
Cheers,
Javad
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
While they both result in a finished speaker, the perception of the final users are very different.
Commercial speakers are manufactured, there are economies of scale that allow them to do more with less cost, there are also tremendous overhead costs that need to be factored into the final price.
The DIYer trades all that for spending their own time which usually no cost is attributed. However those un-ledgered costs are converted into a sense of immense satisfaction at the work, process, learning and solutions created during that process.
Both can ultimately result in good sounding speakers, in both cases the user spending $3k will be convinced theirs is the best, conversely the user who spent weeks designing and building will feel the same way. Both are ultimately right.
Recently my "PS2" speakers consisting of $600 in Peerless and Satori drivers and passive crossovers completely trounced a set of $2k Genelec studio monitors, wasn't even close, but I imagine the Genelec's used about $100 in drivers and they obviously had other compromises as well.
Commercial loudspeakers also have to make compromises to meet their profit requirements, speaker designers at these companies are rarely allowed to build a speaker exactly how they'd like with the quality of components that they'd prefer, so ultimately they do the best with the budget and resources that are available.
The DIYer will make compromises on cabinet or finish quality and aesthetics, but can spend more money on higher end drivers since very few other costs are accounted for. The crossover, tuning and enclosure are big areas where the DIYer can make or break the effort.
IMO I am a DIYer and don't ever see myself buying a commercial loudspeaker, but I do understand why others do and should. Ultimately this is a choice each person should make for themselves.
Cheers,
Javad
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
True. For one thing, there is technical issue...
I don't judge room as part of speaker quality...
Not even bass, even tho bass is the most important for most people.
Transparency is the next important thing for most people, but not for me...
It isn't the theoretical complexity of the specific crossover circuit type (3rd order Butterworth, or 4th order Linkwitz-Riley, or what-have-you) that makes them hard to design properly.
The problem is that everything interacts - the acoustic frequency and phase responses of the drivers aren't flat, the electrical impedance of the drivers isn't flat, and the components in the crossover interact with each other as well as the driver properties.
So usually you have to start by compensating, as best you can, the various dramatic impedance changes in the drivers. That means you have to design Zobel networks to suppress the rising impedance at high frequencies due to voice coil inductance, and, for the tweeter, design an additonal LCR resonant circuit to compensate for the impedance peak resulting from its primary low-frequency mechanical resonance.
Once designed on paper (software), you then have to make new acoustic and electrical measurements of each driver with its compensation network, because these impedance correction components will affect the acoustic response of the drivers, and it usually takes a few tweaks and corrections before you have acceptable impedance compensation networks along with acceptable acoustic frequency response measurements.
After all this is done, you can start on the actual crossover networks. And you face the same problems: the acoustic frequency responses of the raw drivers combine with the electrical frequency response of the crossover network to create the actual behaviour of the speaker. So, more calculation, more measuring, more tweaking, more calculating, round and round, until finally you have something that seems reasonable, both acoustically and electrically. This might include re-designing the cabinet, porting, diffraction control measures taken with the tweeter, et cetera.
For example, one speaker we were designing was found to have a tall, narrow, sharp feature in the frequency response. We tracked down the cause - the fact that there were two port openings on the front panel, symmetrically placed with respect to the tweeter dome. The speaker enclosure was then re-designed, with the symmetrical port opening on the front panel replaced with a single port opening on the rear face of the enclosure. Problem solved, but it took almost a complete redesign of the entire speaker system to do it!
I note that there are tons of speakers out there with twin port openings symmetrically placed near the tweeter; I bet most of them have the same problem, but the manufacturer never bothered to find it or fix it!
Having got this far, then you test for things like tweeter overload under certain types of loud music; if there is a problem, you may have to move the crossover frequency higher to fix this, and that means going almost back to scratch with the crossover networks, and re-designing them. Worse yet, you might find that you have to start over with a new tweeter - now you really are back to square one with the whole crossover design.
Once all the basics seem to be covered, you have to do double-blind listening tests. If there are enough good ears involved, usually some more imperfections will surface during this phase, and the designers go back to their computers to tweak, build, and measure, yet again.
The company I worked for could not afford years of delay in designing a single crossover, but it did take weeks (and sometimes months) of effort involving several different people, and the use of a lot of expensive and specialized resources; everything from very expensive measurement microphones and rented anechoic chamber time to software and hardware test instrumentation to listening panels.
By contrast, most DIY crossovers seem to consist of looking up a couple of textbook formulae, and buying a few capacitors, inductors, and resistors to build them. This would work if speakers really behaved like resistors and really had perfectly flat, infinitely wide frequency responses; but they don't!
Things are easier with active crossovers, but many of the same problems remain: for example, the acoustical phase and frequency responses of the drivers still interacts with the electrical frequency response from the active filter, so you still need the super-accurate measurement microphone, anechoic chamber, and multiple cut-and-try iterations to get it right.
As far as I know, there is just no simple, easy way to design and build a really good crossover network!
-Gnobuddy
I understand. We don't say a good speaker that is designed for big room is bad, simply because our room is small. And I think we cannot say a speaker is good because it is the best to be positioned under a dining table...
Speaker is designed for large to relatively small size, from placed "in-wall" to a few feet in front of the wall. Room treatment is user's responsibility.
Even tho speaker positioning is also user's responsibility, multi-way floor-standing speaker designer should position a woofer at a correct height from the floor (too low is find, but too high is not).
You may know that it takes a lot of knowledge to know the effect of "environments" to sound, so it is not easy for most people to know the real quality of a speaker by listening in short (or even long) moments...
What worse is speaker suitability with certain input signal (music type)...
A bad speaker may sound very good with certain signal, but will fail miserably with other signals if it is not done right from the beginning.
So for me, the good or the bad speaker is first whether it is done right or wrong.
Wharfedale Linton Heritage
I wonder what DIYers think of this product and how it might compete against the classic 3 ways we can find as already available kits. Surely the parts could be had for 570 €/pair, not counting enclosure/finish and postage, but once you calculate in some realistic work hours, I don't know...
I wish there was a way to check what the Linton drive units and crossover filter looked like, as well as in internal of the cabinet.
A truly interesting product for a down to earth purchase price, considering everything.
There is a Stereophile review of it as well.
edit: At last someone figured out it would make a lot of sense to protect the tweeter dome. The only company that does a better job than this is Canton.
I wonder what DIYers think of this product and how it might compete against the classic 3 ways we can find as already available kits. Surely the parts could be had for 570 €/pair, not counting enclosure/finish and postage, but once you calculate in some realistic work hours, I don't know...
I wish there was a way to check what the Linton drive units and crossover filter looked like, as well as in internal of the cabinet.
A truly interesting product for a down to earth purchase price, considering everything.
There is a Stereophile review of it as well.
edit: At last someone figured out it would make a lot of sense to protect the tweeter dome. The only company that does a better job than this is Canton.
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On first sight this loudspeaker ignores 30 years of "how to build a speaker enclosure for correct radiation", while using fancy looking carbon fiber chassis.
You will need a highly complicated x-over with countless parts, just to make it sound right on a very narrow axis.
A design that put´s the retro look over sound quality.
The future of DIYS loudspeaker design is fully active DSP controlled. Such speakers, done right, outperform any commercial design.
The cost of DSP and additional amp´s are lower than good passive x-over components, which will never work as well.
Off course, this is unwanted by the DIYS trade, as they make hardly any profit on drivers. They earn most of their money on the fancy coils and cap´s they sell, many hundreds of % overpriced, if you compare them to high quality industry components.
Today the tools to design a loudspeaker are as cheap as sub 100US$ for a calibrated microphone + sound card. Any thing else is available for free, which means software and the knowledge how to design such a speaker from scratch.
High quality loudspeaker chassis are still not cheap, but never have been better, while D-amps modules and SMPS have made this side of the game ridiculously inexpensive.
The DIYS active speaker builder can only do one huge mistake: Try to integrate the electronics into the speaker enclousure. Keep the electronics separate and all is well.
You will need a highly complicated x-over with countless parts, just to make it sound right on a very narrow axis.
A design that put´s the retro look over sound quality.
The future of DIYS loudspeaker design is fully active DSP controlled. Such speakers, done right, outperform any commercial design.
The cost of DSP and additional amp´s are lower than good passive x-over components, which will never work as well.
Off course, this is unwanted by the DIYS trade, as they make hardly any profit on drivers. They earn most of their money on the fancy coils and cap´s they sell, many hundreds of % overpriced, if you compare them to high quality industry components.
Today the tools to design a loudspeaker are as cheap as sub 100US$ for a calibrated microphone + sound card. Any thing else is available for free, which means software and the knowledge how to design such a speaker from scratch.
High quality loudspeaker chassis are still not cheap, but never have been better, while D-amps modules and SMPS have made this side of the game ridiculously inexpensive.
The DIYS active speaker builder can only do one huge mistake: Try to integrate the electronics into the speaker enclousure. Keep the electronics separate and all is well.
You've clearly not looked at a number of the superlative designs on here. I assume you wouldn't suggest that DIY is only for speakers and we are somehow not good enough to build good amplifiers?
High End has nothing to do with sound quality.
It is about using expensive materials to house common technology and tell technical fairy tales about it to people that are willing to pay for this package.
Today the best amplifiers can be rebuild for a fraction "High End" prices with identical parts as used by the "world best" amp brands.
If you don´t know that, good for the trade and your sales guru´s.
Active, DSP controlled loudspeaker constructions are not automatically high end, sure, but are a good way to perfect reproduction
Luckily the best loudspeaker chassis are freely available for DIYS. So if you know how to use your stuff, it is no miracle to build speakers that outperform very expensive, stock speakers.
No amp will be happy to work on a passive x-over. A plain speaker is a load that is much simpler to drive. This alone makes the same speaker and amp sound better.
It is about using expensive materials to house common technology and tell technical fairy tales about it to people that are willing to pay for this package.
Today the best amplifiers can be rebuild for a fraction "High End" prices with identical parts as used by the "world best" amp brands.
If you don´t know that, good for the trade and your sales guru´s.
Active, DSP controlled loudspeaker constructions are not automatically high end, sure, but are a good way to perfect reproduction
Luckily the best loudspeaker chassis are freely available for DIYS. So if you know how to use your stuff, it is no miracle to build speakers that outperform very expensive, stock speakers.
No amp will be happy to work on a passive x-over. A plain speaker is a load that is much simpler to drive. This alone makes the same speaker and amp sound better.
Why do you say this, it doesn't seem to help to make your point. Besides, my compression tweeter impedance looks worse with no added components, what does this say for all the systems connected this way?
A good passive crossover network will include impedance compensation components for both drivers.
A Zobel network to compensate for the rising impedance due to voice coil inductance is simple and effective, and can be used on both woofers and tweeters. (Midranges too, if you're dealing with a 3-way system.)
Compensating for the impedance peak at the fundamental resonance frequency of the driver is a little more expensive as it requires both inductance and capacitance (and resistance), but it must be done for the tweeter (and midrange if any) in order for the passive crossover network to function properly.
This isn't usually done for the woofer, because it requires large inductance and capacitance values, and more importantly, because the woofer impedance hump, which is somewhere down below 100 Hz, doesn't bother any half-decent amplifier.
Once properly designed (and measured) impedance compensation for the drivers is in place, the resulting composite impedance is, as AllenB says, usually flatter than any one driver by itself, particularly at the frequencies where it actually matters.
Of course, if someone looks up the simple textbook formulae (such as L = Rs/(2 pi fc) and C = 1/(2 pi fc Rs)), and just builds a crossover network using those, the results are usually disastrous, both in terms of impedance curves and frequency response response curves. The same goes for those ready-made generic crossover networks sold by businesses such as Parts Express.
-Gnobuddy
Gnobuddy is right.
There are things that cannot be done with electronic xover such as attenuating a part of the mid-treble or modifying an intermediate part of a loudspeaker band.
So I came to the conclusion that on certain occasions (even with active xover) adjustments are necessary that only with passive components is it possible to do. For me the filter and the associated speaker are one.
There are things that cannot be done with electronic xover such as attenuating a part of the mid-treble or modifying an intermediate part of a loudspeaker band.
So I came to the conclusion that on certain occasions (even with active xover) adjustments are necessary that only with passive components is it possible to do. For me the filter and the associated speaker are one.
I wouldn't say that. An active filter can do anything that a passive filter can, and then some. Particularly with DSP filters, you can generate pretty much any reasonable (and even fairly unreasonable) frequency response you want.
Decades ago, good quality power amplifiers were very expensive, and inductors (and caps) were much cheaper. So it made economic sense to use one power amplifier, and a passive crossover network.
Now those costs have been turned upside down. Excellent power amplifiers can be had for a few dollars, as long as we avoid superstitious beliefs. Op-amps and/or DSP codecs are cheap too, while big inductors are far more expensive. Now it makes more sense to use one power amplifier per (speaker) driver, and an active filter to split up the signal ahead of the amplifiers.
You can still say that the filter and speaker are one, with the idea slightly expanded so that the filter, power amp, and speaker are all one system.
-Gnobuddy
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