How can you achieve the cardioid polar pattern with an analogue crossover? A short explanation with some best-practise examples would be very nice.
It's clear you enjoy your system very much and are quite proud of it.
I second hi-fijim's congrats.
Have you built a large collection of master tapes? They look to be terribly expensive
I used to end up only wanting to listen to the very best recordings, like the Sheffield LPs etc, because I had done everything i knew to my system and room, and then source material became the defining objective/constraint.
I think that happens to me when I focus all my attention on one system in one room. Ears get blinders on so to speak.
Anyway nowadays, I keep multiple, very diverse systems running, and seem to be constantly trying something new.
I cannot begin to say how much dsp has helped all the multiple diverse builds....and how generally excellent they have all turned out....many actually exceeding the fine store bought gear accumulated in the analog era.
I use the same simple formula on all....make the best acoustic design i can through sim and then prototype trial and error....then correct driver by driver with minimum phase, and sum with linear phase xovers. Simple really.
Anyway, you're happy with yours, and I'm happy with mine , cool
Btw, if you want a passive eq that appears in full keeping with the system you describe, I have a Manley Massive Passive i'd be willing to put a price on.
You don't even need a crossover to achieve a cardioid pattern; a dipole loudspeaker already does it purely acoustical ....
Let me reverse your question: Why would you need DSP to create a cardioid pattern in a design like the Kii (front- back- and side-firing woofers)??
Easy, you can make a delay line with a rotating tape and multiple heads. That's how they did echo back in the day...
Cardioid with a DSP, gives much more control of the situation.
Dipole does not. I might cancel itself out in some areas... but not in a controlled manner as a DSP controlled cardioid..... this should be obvious
Moderne techniques are sometimes smarter.... why is that so hard to believe?
If the drivers and the loudspeaker cabinet is build for a simple analog crossover.... great. But if you just want a little bit of precision and use a bigger variaty of drives.... an active solution with a DSP is really the way to go. Most analog speakers that I have heard - no matter the price. Has to live with some kind of compromise, since they cant have good transparency, unless they use few components... but they need many components to obtain good precision.... so many times I experience passive speakers as fighting themselves - not really being able to do anything good..... medium.... ok .... but never really shine. Oh... a few do play well... when they have access to special drivers and other unique situations, that normal diy people cant come close to.
But as a diy hifi-guy.... an active system really makes it a new world of possibilities.
I'm sorry to inform you.... that it's not going to happen. not because we dont want to.... but because specific driveres in an unknown box... is impossible to predict.... if you want it to be good.
If you build the speaker from some kind of kit.... please post which one. But if it's just some freely thought out design....then you have to measure and find out exactly what each driver is doing. Please do yourself a favor and read up on how to measure... I'm not kidding. Read something like this for starters:
Loudspeaker measurements
And maybe ask the moderators to move your post to a new thread, so that you can get specific help for your project
It would probably best to create your own topic for this. It’s quite far removed from the subject matter discussed here.
Post moved to new thread here:
Easy, you can make a delay line with a rotating tape and multiple heads. That's how they did echo back in the day...
Or with simple op amp circuits like done by Linkwitz:
Active Filters
Agreed that DSP is the way to go nowadays, but the question of the TO was if speakers filtered/equalized by DSP would sound better or worse than speakers filtered/equalized by analog circuitry.
Until now I have not heard a strong argument why DSP should be superior, apart from "ease of use".
The DSP applied to Kii can also be replaced by analog circuitry, even to control a variable cardioid pattern.
About passive vs DSP active speakers: I have heard many good sounding passive speakers over the years and actually not so many good sounding DSP controlled speakers. However, to be honest, I haven't heard Kii and D&D.
Would you mind giving me examples of a few DSP controlled speakers that did not sound good (assuming they were known commercial offerings) and which passive ones you considered to be good sounding, as a kind of a reference?
YSDR wrote -
Thanks, I was pulling my info from memory, and of course you are correct. You seem to be correct on all things related to Hypex fusion... I never got the chance to express my thanks for your Hypex wisdom. I read most of your posts (mostly directed to other people), and collectively those posts made my entire Hypex fusion project a smooth and trouble free event.
Thanks, I was pulling my info from memory, and of course you are correct. You seem to be correct on all things related to Hypex fusion...
I never got the chance to express my thanks for your Hypex wisdom. I read most of your posts (mostly directed to other people), and collectively those posts made my entire Hypex fusion project a smooth and trouble free event.
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I like the original question, it has spawned a lot of discussion. But I am not sure we are any closer to answering it.
Let's stipulate a relatively simple loudspeaker with a 6 inch driver (Satori MW16P) and a 29 mm soft dome tweeter (ScanSpeak D2905/9500). These drivers would be well matched, and a talented designer could put together a great sounding passive crossover.
Now lets assume that we use DSP to mimic the passive crossover... i.e. we match the woofer rolloff and any baffle step adjustment... we match the tweeter high pass slope, and also mimic any notch filtering the designer may have included... but we do no additional EQ within the drivers pass band... we limit ourselves to mimic the passive crossover. We limit ourselves to IIR digital tools which mimic analog circuits.
If I believe that the A/D/A process will inherently degrade the sound (even if just by a tiny amount), then I will conclude that the DSP version will, at best, sound nearly as good as the passive version... but only with the most flawless of A/D/A processing. The DSP version will never sound better... how could it? And in most cases it will sound inferior to the passive version.
If on the other hand I believe that the latest A/D/A technology is sonically transparent with no degradation, Then I will conclude that the DSP version will sound the same... Further, if I am one of those people who believes that a driver sounds best when connected directly to an amp... that passing a lot of current through large capacitors and big coils involves an inherent degradation, than I will conclude that the DSP version could sound better than the passive version.
This thought experiment ignores many of the powerful capabilities of DSP for the sake of discussion... My point is that what we believe (our starting assumptions) will steer us to a conclusion... We are not really arguing about the Kii Three and PSI Audio, we are arguing about our fundamental assumptions.
Although I don't have a big wisdom, but imo if the equalization and crossing is totally the same then the difference (if any) comes from the implementation of the two technology (analog vs digital), like the realization of the circuits, knowing the bottlenecks and drawbacks of both the used parts (and how they reacts to each other) and topologies etc.
As a manufacturer (not audio equipment) I am always wondering how just a few other manufacturers use the potencials in their products. The market is full of flawed products like the engineers don't really knowing what they are doing from technical point of view, meanwhile they are making a lot of money sometimes. Of course the pruducts are works, but far from optimal and a few modify here and there and the result would be a much better product. Of course sometimes the flaw are intended in the product.
Maybe that's just a bad generalization on my part, projecting my experience to other industries, so I apologize if I am wrong.
An example which was written here before I think: we can't say that a Mercedes is better in general than a BMW, maybe the former have more reliable models (I don't know), but sometimes the latter makes equivalent or even better models.
A wrong assumption I saw in this topic is that a 3000-4000$ DSP unit is as good as can be. The reality is that we don't know until measured (or listened). We can find examples relative easily that sometimes the price of an audio device have very little relation to the objective sound quality.
@hifijim
Thanks for your kind of words! I just like the Hypex FA-s, and wants to help others to find their joy with this great amps eqiupped with DSP.
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But that is NOT delay! It's phase shift. Not the same.
Why do you keep asking this? What do you think you'll get out of this question? It won't help you answer anything. You'll just hear an oppinion about speaker A, B C and D.. nothing else.
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The problem was that a conventional 3-way "all 3 drivers on the front" speaker was chosen as a comparison to two un-conventional >3 speakers "som on the side" type speakers. That confused a whole lot ;-)
It's not a 10-1 win for digital but personally, if I had to choose, I'd go digital.
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