I actually have no idea. Big enough to hold the mid and tweeter, small enough to fit in a 12x12 room. Ultimately whatever sounds best, I care far less about cosmetics.
Great, I wondered this. With my anaylzation of the distortion graphs of the tweeter I am at the belief a 24 db electrical at 1800 will eliminate all audible distortion for both drivers, however will this affect the acoustic slope, and is that low enough to filter the breakup? Any other thoughts?
I have Passive Crossover Designer 7 (2003) and Baffle Difraction Simulator, Both excel programs, will this work for me if I learn how to use these?
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Since you are going active X-over, have you thought about approaching this as a "modular" build? Each driver can have its own appropriately sized box which you stack up and play with the different combinations in terms of driver spacing, ordering and X-over points.
Once you figure out which driver combination works best for you, you can consider co-locating the drivers in the same cabinet and start thinking about things like baffle-step correction and the like. Or simply keep the boxes and construct a frame to mount them to in a more permanent configuration.
Build the Shiva boxes first - you can always use them with your current system. Then a box for the tweeters, mids etc. I would probably size the individual boxes for an optimal LF sealed alignment, just to keep driver excursion and phase more predictable at the low end of their response range.
As for setting/matching the gain on the amplifiers that's fairly straight forward. Burn a low amplitude 60Hz test tone on a CD and play it through each amp in turn (using the same CD player). measure the voltage output at the speaker terminal using a DMM and use the volume/gain control on each amp to make the levels the same across all the amps. As a bonus once you start tuning and tweaking the system, you can raise or lower the levels of the individual drivers either via changing the gain within the crossover X-over or more simply by using the volume knob on the associated amplifiers.
Good luck and keep us updated on how it goes.
-bill
Once you figure out which driver combination works best for you, you can consider co-locating the drivers in the same cabinet and start thinking about things like baffle-step correction and the like. Or simply keep the boxes and construct a frame to mount them to in a more permanent configuration.
Build the Shiva boxes first - you can always use them with your current system. Then a box for the tweeters, mids etc. I would probably size the individual boxes for an optimal LF sealed alignment, just to keep driver excursion and phase more predictable at the low end of their response range.
As for setting/matching the gain on the amplifiers that's fairly straight forward. Burn a low amplitude 60Hz test tone on a CD and play it through each amp in turn (using the same CD player). measure the voltage output at the speaker terminal using a DMM and use the volume/gain control on each amp to make the levels the same across all the amps. As a bonus once you start tuning and tweaking the system, you can raise or lower the levels of the individual drivers either via changing the gain within the crossover X-over or more simply by using the volume knob on the associated amplifiers.
Good luck and keep us updated on how it goes.
-bill
Oh, and BTW - even though you are going with an active x-over I would still consider a simple high-pass passive filter on the tweeter. Just a simple in-line capacitor sized to roll-off response below 100HZ or so so that any accidental LF/DC output from the amp doesn't fry the driver.
-b
-b
If you can get those excel sheets working right then yea, they can be a great way to get a starting point for an unmeasured passive x-over. I guess I'm confused at this point about whether you are going active or passive... Those tools are used to design a passive system. As long as you can get those aluminum cone breakups down ~20dB from the fundamental they will be, for all intents and purposes, nullified. 24dB/octave is probably more aggressive than needed so if you go passive you can likely save yourself some major component costs by designing a 2nd order, or possible mixed 2nd/3rd order.
I guess I'm just confused to. the miniDSP active crossover I was looking at is $135, but it only has 4 outputs, or in other words, 2 way stereo or 4 way mono. Also, it is unbalanced, and I plan to purchase a high powered amp for the subs and at that point I think I want balanced locking XLR connectors.
I could go with something like Behringer DCX2496 Ultradrive Pro Digital Crossover 248-669, and use XLR to rca connectors for the mids and highs, but $330 is a lot of money for a crossover. If there was a 2 way crossover with XLR outputs and delay settings (I feel stuck on having delays because of how much they seemingly helped with sub timing in my car) for much cheaper then I would be fine active between subs and mids and with a passive crossover between mids and highs.
In fact, I would look actually look foward to the challenge of a passive design, and am considering getting lspCAD and a mic to measure, as I will certainly be building many more passive setups, and my ears are not trained to know what flat sounds like. This mic seems adequete for response measuring, Dayton Audio EMM-6 Electret Measurement Microphone Allows For Accurate Acoustic Measurements At A Fraction Of The Price 390-801 but it needs phantom power, can a sound card for my PC give me this?
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