linkwitz phoenix + aleph 2

[JayV]

Have anyone tried this combination? The aleph has a little higher distortion than he recomends: "<0.1% distortion and >20 damping factor.".

Is it hard to rebuild the Crossover/EQ for balanced operation?

[MBK]

You'll need 3 of them and I suggest only using them for the midrange... - with some class AB SS for the woofers (chip amp a la gainclone, easy to build, or X-amp - not AX though), and Aleph 3/30 or Mini-A for the Tweeters...

I have a Linkwitz style dipole, fullrange from 310 Hz up (no tweeter). I just built some Mini-Alephs for the fullranges. That works fine, the ca. 25 W RMS is a-plenty. My woofers are now on one BB OPA549 per woofer (2 per channel, 4 in total), also plenty, drives them to more than cone excursion limits. Sound is tight and well controlled even though the mini-A has a less favorable output Z because only 1 output device.

After all in such bi/triamped systems you need less power per channel, so distortion will be less in Aleph topology as I understand, and you stay away some 2 octaves from Fs so damping factor should be less of an issue. Besides the Aleph2 distortion quoted surely represents a worst case figure into 4 Ohms.

The X-O: all you need to do is to add an IC unbal-> bal converter per output, such as 6 DRV134 or 3 DRV 2134 (double channel) total, from Burr Brown/Texas Instruments. Add this after the last buffer of each X-O channel, and without the R196 output resistors which will not be needed in this case.

[JayV]

Im thinking about using a Behringer ULTRADRIVE PRO DCX2496 instead of building the filter, then i can go balanced all the way and perhaps do some room correction and tweaks...

I have already decided to build 6 aleph2, just not sure what speaker i should build yet...