Noob needing advice - Driver cost vs Sound Quality Estimates

[dublin78]

It looks like they have a special offer on for 688EUR per speaker

[mstang1988]

Originally Posted by dublin78

It looks like they have a special offer on for 688EUR per speaker

That's for the pair I believe. Copied from the site:

EUR 688,00
a pair

I would consider going with the higher quality crossover but also saw their 2020 which has an active crossover which is sending me down another path of investigation :-)

[Charles Darwin]

You could just get the drivers and MiniDSP.

[mstang1988]

Originally Posted by Charles Darwin

You could just get the drivers and MiniDSP.

That's exactly what I was looking at; of course I would need to figure out the amp solution. I started looking through the uses of the Mini DSP on here and got sidetracked with it's use in DIY subs.

[dublin78]

EUR 688,00 per pair.

You are correct. Seems very good value.

The minidsp modules are not the last word in SQ due to their ADC and DAC components. If you go down this route, and assuming that you are using a digital source, think about the nanoDIGI (also miniDSP) which requires a seperate DAC after it. One per stereo channel! The Twisted Pear Buffallo III is very well regarded and will handle four stereo pairs. You would need a Twisted Pear IVY stage per stereo pair. And obviously power amp units per channel. For power amps look at 41Hz kits, Hypex UCD180, or modules from classdaudio.com. All of these are very popular, and offer excellent results for the investment.

Frankly, if you choose to go down the active dsp route, then you can design you own speaker with any drivers you want, in any configuration you want, and be confident of getting the result that you are looking for. So long as drivers are given suitably sized chambers, it would be hard to go wrong.

[Charles Darwin]

Are Hypex selling their DSP modules yet?

Might make sense going with them if you are already using their amps.
Personally I haven't tried them so can't say anything about the quality of Hypex' conversion.
Or just use one of their plate amps with the DSP built in.

[dublin78]

Are Hypex selling their DSP modules yet?

Yes, they are, but they look like a complicated solution. There is a thread over in the digital line-level section

[Charles Darwin]

Cheers!

I haven't looked in that section for a while.

[mstang1988]

After a bit of reading in Minidsp I understand most of the time they are used directly out of the source (cd player etc). As the user above stated doing ADC then DAC will have lost some quality. Will this be noticeable? The reason I ask is I would have to run from 7.1 outs on my RSP-1068 and between my amps. The RSP is my switch for multiple sources so I cannot bypass it and in addition for things like blu-ray, etc I want multi-channel out.

It's great to hear though that having a DSP acting as a digital crossover significantly helps merging a driver combination.

[dublin78]

Extra ADC and DAC will not be terrible, just not optimal.