The impedance peak is not especially large, I wonder if the resonance isn't mostly beyond the control of the amplifier.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL YOU.!
I want to ask if this filter addition doesn't sacrifice HF details ? I like the get the most of the tweeter without risking it to distort or sound harsh. I owned a pair of B&W DM-602 S2 I sold because the mid-range was dominant. However, I keep a pair of Monitor Audio Silver S2 because they are more discrete at mid-frequency, so the high and bass are more noticeable. Thanks.!
I want to ask if this filter addition doesn't sacrifice HF details ? I like the get the most of the tweeter without risking it to distort or sound harsh. I owned a pair of B&W DM-602 S2 I sold because the mid-range was dominant. However, I keep a pair of Monitor Audio Silver S2 because they are more discrete at mid-frequency, so the high and bass are more noticeable. Thanks.!
with risk of insulting DIYERS in diywebsite, the short answer (not for thread starter but anyone why steps in to the DIY) NO, diy speakers cant compete with brand. I'm 17 years active in loudspeaker building,more than 85 diferent speaker pairs. project using from small stand to line arrays with 20 accuton bass drivers. I used berylium tweeters when they were not available to public.
I have also completed some high cost diy projects like from humble home made hifi(where xovers alone cost 2500eur , total cost of parts 8000EUR).
in blind tests a simple sonus faber guarneri memento(15KEUR), parts price around( 1500EUR for Sonus faber team) was preferd my ALL listeners(8)
its very easy to say diy is better, but when yhou step in real high end speakers and you really own 50Keur speakers to comapre with DIY rivals you understand what is sound. speaker sonics its not about the drivers. its month or years of development.
for exapmple to build cheap standmount speakers with 35-55eur drivers cost roughtly 40 000eur of direct and indirect expenses.
I'm not speakning about bad brand speakers and bad diy, I'm talking about best diy and comercial brands. to few resources, to few rooms, too few R&D crew. not fair game.
i have never saw any of high end speakers owner turned to diy speakers . And never saw any DIYER owning 50KEUR+ brand speakers..
DIY is for a) fun/hobby or b) for inability to acquire peviuosly mentiond 50KEUR brand speakers without hurting family..
Happy new Year
I have also completed some high cost diy projects like from humble home made hifi(where xovers alone cost 2500eur , total cost of parts 8000EUR).
in blind tests a simple sonus faber guarneri memento(15KEUR), parts price around( 1500EUR for Sonus faber team) was preferd my ALL listeners(8)
its very easy to say diy is better, but when yhou step in real high end speakers and you really own 50Keur speakers to comapre with DIY rivals you understand what is sound. speaker sonics its not about the drivers. its month or years of development.
for exapmple to build cheap standmount speakers with 35-55eur drivers cost roughtly 40 000eur of direct and indirect expenses.
I'm not speakning about bad brand speakers and bad diy, I'm talking about best diy and comercial brands. to few resources, to few rooms, too few R&D crew. not fair game.
i have never saw any of high end speakers owner turned to diy speakers . And never saw any DIYER owning 50KEUR+ brand speakers..
DIY is for a) fun/hobby or b) for inability to acquire peviuosly mentiond 50KEUR brand speakers without hurting family..
Happy new Year
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My experience of filters like this on is they reduce the hard sibilance and allow the natrural sound of cymbals especially, to be heard more accurately. However that was on a soft dome tweeter so I am unsure how it will translate to a aluminium dome.
Its not an expensiver option so you could see what they sound like with the 1R and if you find them a bit harsh at the top, first take the 1R out I perdict this will make the tweeter brighter but should alow the amplifier to damp it better. If it is too bright then install the resistor cap combination.
Whatever happens it is likely you will need to adjust the crossover to some extent, you need to think of it as a good starting point not a fully resolved solution. The drivers will probably behave slightly differently from the ones used for the data sheets and the cabinet will affect the performance to some extent as well. In the end I believe speakers need to be adjusted by ear as you are balancing so many compromises you can’t predict which ones are most important to the sound.
If you are concerned about forward mid range I can do you a similar set of plots showing how the crossover pulls the mid range up and down.
Its not an expensiver option so you could see what they sound like with the 1R and if you find them a bit harsh at the top, first take the 1R out I perdict this will make the tweeter brighter but should alow the amplifier to damp it better. If it is too bright then install the resistor cap combination.
Whatever happens it is likely you will need to adjust the crossover to some extent, you need to think of it as a good starting point not a fully resolved solution. The drivers will probably behave slightly differently from the ones used for the data sheets and the cabinet will affect the performance to some extent as well. In the end I believe speakers need to be adjusted by ear as you are balancing so many compromises you can’t predict which ones are most important to the sound.
If you are concerned about forward mid range I can do you a similar set of plots showing how the crossover pulls the mid range up and down.
Whilst I am not sure I completely agree with elvaiukai (its hard to argue with his evidence though), it is certainly true that the first passive speaker I designed took 18 months, as I learnt what to do and we iterated through different approaches.
At the time I was an active member of the uk AES so was lucky enought to discuss ideas with Richard Small who was working at KEF at the time as well as numerous other KEF engineers. KEF and Meridian were backed by the same investors at that time so there was some cooperation between us. I also had Bob Stuart mentoring me (mostly because he hates designing passive speakers) so was happy for me to learn and Bob employed Martin Collumbs on contract to help with the design (although in the end Bob was not happy with Martins approach and asked me to start over). I was also lucky enough to go to a lecture by Nevil Theil, in which he talked about his approach and spent alot of time appolagising for some errors that crept into his origional paper. So I stood on the shoulders of giants and probably reached down slightly as I dont think I ever achieved their level of skill!
Part of what takes the time is cabinet iteration as they take a long time to have prototypes made and even when the design was working we ended up with another cabinet iteration as the aesthetic didnt work well. Also at that time simulators and measurement tools were not as easily available, we didnt have an anechoic chamber and KEF were not happy for us to use theirs.
I think my last passive design took 9 months and there would have been probably 50 to 100 hours of listening tests. Some blind, where I made a change then invited another listener to evaluate it without telling them what it was or which speaker was which. Double blind just becomes too difficult to arrange so I made sure I kept quiet and out of the listeners field of view to reduce any bias transfer. However a comercial design has to balance many different listening tastes and it needs to work over the tolerance of the parts chosen to be succesful, for personal use you only need to match one listening preference and one set of parts.
I would like to think a good DIY design could rival a comercial one especially if it only has to match one persons listening taste. However I would say if possible it is very helpful to have a reference speaker to refer to when designing, preferably a much more expensive one, as it is supprisingly easy to end up optimising one characteristic to the expense of others and not notice till you do a direct comparison to a known good solution.
At the time I was an active member of the uk AES so was lucky enought to discuss ideas with Richard Small who was working at KEF at the time as well as numerous other KEF engineers. KEF and Meridian were backed by the same investors at that time so there was some cooperation between us. I also had Bob Stuart mentoring me (mostly because he hates designing passive speakers) so was happy for me to learn and Bob employed Martin Collumbs on contract to help with the design (although in the end Bob was not happy with Martins approach and asked me to start over). I was also lucky enough to go to a lecture by Nevil Theil, in which he talked about his approach and spent alot of time appolagising for some errors that crept into his origional paper. So I stood on the shoulders of giants and probably reached down slightly as I dont think I ever achieved their level of skill!
Part of what takes the time is cabinet iteration as they take a long time to have prototypes made and even when the design was working we ended up with another cabinet iteration as the aesthetic didnt work well. Also at that time simulators and measurement tools were not as easily available, we didnt have an anechoic chamber and KEF were not happy for us to use theirs.
I think my last passive design took 9 months and there would have been probably 50 to 100 hours of listening tests. Some blind, where I made a change then invited another listener to evaluate it without telling them what it was or which speaker was which. Double blind just becomes too difficult to arrange so I made sure I kept quiet and out of the listeners field of view to reduce any bias transfer. However a comercial design has to balance many different listening tastes and it needs to work over the tolerance of the parts chosen to be succesful, for personal use you only need to match one listening preference and one set of parts.
I would like to think a good DIY design could rival a comercial one especially if it only has to match one persons listening taste. However I would say if possible it is very helpful to have a reference speaker to refer to when designing, preferably a much more expensive one, as it is supprisingly easy to end up optimising one characteristic to the expense of others and not notice till you do a direct comparison to a known good solution.
yes, but not one. its hard to design competetive speakers wihtout at least 2-3 competitors speakers, and without 2-3 listenining enviroments(idealy 6-7enviroments and 2-3 placing positions)
i have heard lot of complaints in audioshows that expensve speakers sounds like sh... and some folks home brewed speakers sounds 3x better for 20x less money. yet I have witnessed only two times those direct comparissions after those claims, where both speakers used same hotel room/system/setup Sudently owners face of those very "cheap and very high performance speaker" went grey, then red.
What is easily can be done with DIY- less discortions,less coloration , more rigid box, more linear frequency response, more expensive drivers.
Unfortunatelly high end speakers is not about all those things. And most realisticaly sounding speakers Ihave measured was not so linear as expected to.
I will do all as you say. Will test them using all the options you have provided. More than happy with all your support and assistance.!
I have certainly suffered the hotel room effect, some how hotel designers seem to be able to come up with a optimally bad acoustic in almost every hotel room. We tried all sorts of approaches to “fix” them. Rugs, bass traps, sound absorbers - they always sound terrible! It is possibly also due to needing to play the speakers much louder than normal to overcome the background noise.
I am sorry but I mostly disagree with you.! I am not looking for competition with any $50K speaker made by a brand name, if it matters for someone, I can tell I have spent many hours listening ultra hi-end gear at Hi-Fi boutiques. Wilson Audio, Triangle, Thiel, B&W, Tannoy, Dynaudio, and many others. To be honest, some of them sound like garbage to my taste. It isn't the money you pay what makes a loudspeaker good or bad, it is the way you like how they sound what makes you happy and justify you own them. I am more than sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of DIY speakers that sounds better for many people than many of the so called ultra hi-end and priced staff. My speakers aren't to bring friends at home and to show I have spent thousands to own them but to listen to the music I like the way I like. It is a narrow argument to assume that a "name" be the last word about sound quality since everyone has his own preferences and all of them are valid. I have money to pay a pair of good quality speakers, let say a pair of Tannoy dual concentric, but I am very enthusiastic with the idea of building them by "myself", and even more with the tremendous support I am finding in this community. Having said it, I am clear I won't get the ultimate loudspeakers, specially spending $200 on drivers. But, I will be happy with them and will tune them to my preferences.
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As people seem intereted in me reminiscing about my days in audio design, another little relevant conversation I had with Bob stuart was about presentation acceptance in listening tests.
Bob was and still is fascinated by phsycoacoustics and I remeber him telling me I should optimise the speaker to have a polar pattern as close to the human voice as possible. The reason for this is the human mind is extreemly well adapted to correcting for room effects when hearing a human voice. For example you can almost always recongnise someones voice in any room even if the room has significantly affected the percieved frequency response. ( To achieve this you need a baffle about the width of a human head, arround 6 inch drive units and a semi horn loaded tweeter and alot of messing about taking polar respons measurements)
If a speaker has a human voice type polar pattern your mind will adapt to it quickly and you find it sounds natural in most rooms very quickly. Your mind takes less time to adapt to it, clearly this is an advantage in both placing the speaker and in selling the speaker in unknown listening rooms.
However if you spent longer listening to a speaker that did not have this characteristic, your mind is still fully capable of adapting to its response it will just take longer. Once adapted other characteristics of this speaker might make it a better overall solution.
Bob was and still is fascinated by phsycoacoustics and I remeber him telling me I should optimise the speaker to have a polar pattern as close to the human voice as possible. The reason for this is the human mind is extreemly well adapted to correcting for room effects when hearing a human voice. For example you can almost always recongnise someones voice in any room even if the room has significantly affected the percieved frequency response. ( To achieve this you need a baffle about the width of a human head, arround 6 inch drive units and a semi horn loaded tweeter and alot of messing about taking polar respons measurements)
If a speaker has a human voice type polar pattern your mind will adapt to it quickly and you find it sounds natural in most rooms very quickly. Your mind takes less time to adapt to it, clearly this is an advantage in both placing the speaker and in selling the speaker in unknown listening rooms.
However if you spent longer listening to a speaker that did not have this characteristic, your mind is still fully capable of adapting to its response it will just take longer. Once adapted other characteristics of this speaker might make it a better overall solution.
Thanks fro this I don't think I have seen it before.
As you can see Bob was interested in the leading edge of digital speaker design hence I ended up doing the Passive speaker and some of the active but not digital updates. I also did a lot of work on the electronics whilst I was there so my time was not all on speaker design.
Your first sentence is false, but you then go on to state some true and interesting points.
Commercial/brand speakers are speakers made for a profit, typically by a large corporation. This includes commercial speakers that most DIYers would like to be able to build something comparable for less or something significantly better for about the same price. KEF, Focal, Klipsch, Pioneer, B&W, etc.
Typical DIY speaker questions:
1) Can a DIYer match the capabilities of a $1,000 BRANDX speaker for significantly less than a $1,000?; or
2) Can a DIYer build a speaker for $1,000 (his budget that could have gone to a BRANDX speaker) that performs significantly better?
(Where the term "significantly" is specific to the individual, and$1,000 is an arbitrary amount well below $50k)
The best answer to these questions was provide earlier: "it depends", but under many circumstances the answers are yes.
I don't know about a $50k speaker, and I have no reason to doubt what you say. But I have never heard someone say DIY can beat a speaker that expensive. And I've never seen a potential DIYer ask the questions about a speaker that expensive.
diy speakers can walk all over "high end names"
too many high end speakers have been taken apart to reveal non exotic super dooper drivers available to the man in the street cheap.
I own 5grand speakers unused, have heard and owned plenty of household names with raving reviews
guess what they are all hyped shite
I came to this forum (a mind of information) on my first diy speaker open baffle and would not look back..........
where I am now is into compression drivers/horns synergy style with twin 15" direct radiators multiple PA amplifiers minidsp rew/microphone all costing less than £800 that blows the pants of nearly everthing out there
diy can be cheap
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