I'm putting in alot of time, yes! I was unhappy with the readings I was getting and believe it was the way the calibrated mic was being patched in to the system. So today I hooked up my Sonar Sound Studio 25 adapter which is an older version of the Steinberg which minidsp shows on their page as acceptable. This way I'm plugging the mic right into the "sound card". The drawback is that it's not as good a playing vehicle as my regular DAC and it generates alot of usb noise in addition to the minidsp. Right away my readings looked much more believable. My delay has dropped two notches to 0.35411ms. And the eq is different. It's less bass heavy, but I need to listen for a while. I've now packed up my friend's mic to return and unpacked it about 20 times. Meanwhile I'm hearing alot of great music.
I've revamped my setup. Acquired a usb hub. Now I can playback thru my favorite dac, record thru the Sonar Sound Studio w calibrated mic, and run minidsp nearly noise free. Took my first set of readings with no EQ whatsoever and no crossovers. Ran the woofer sweep from 30-2,000Hz and the tweeter sweep from 180-20,000Hz. Here are my averages of each (6X each). What is my next move? Do I try to set EQ filters or crossovers and where would be a good frequency to start with the crossover? Thank you.
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Thanks X. Before I saw ur reply I went ahead with minor negative EQ to smooth things a bit and set up a crossover of 600 Hz(!) It sounded pretty acceptable early on which is totally unlike how I started weeks ago. My new testing setup seems to be working correctly. The biggest surprise is I added a 4X usb hub on a 1/2 meter cable because my laptop has only two jacks. I have both the DAC and minidsp (both self powered) plugged into it and the mic interface, which needs to draw its power from the usb connection and doesn't always turn on, plugged into the jack next to the power connector. It all works. And it's absent most all the noise I was getting before. Plus, and this I cannot figure, the signal coming out of my dac is louder.
At any rate, the sound is cleaner, especially the bass and with only a bit of EQ tweaking is sounding very good. Not quite there, but on the right track. The actual crossover point (set at 600Hz) is ~520Hz.
At any rate, the sound is cleaner, especially the bass and with only a bit of EQ tweaking is sounding very good. Not quite there, but on the right track. The actual crossover point (set at 600Hz) is ~520Hz.
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that's a good question. I've been listening with my subs going as well and cannot remember the exact setup when I took that overall reading. So I just measured again with the subs absolutely off. And yes, it does look like I'm getting down to 40Hz on the uTrynergy's. This is with no smoothing.
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Thanks X. I'm still being wowed by these uTryn's! As soon as I turn them on the low end speaks to me. They are ideal when I'm sitting in the sweet spot; they sit on speakers ~19" off the ground with the horn flare vertically, so a narrow listening zone. When I get tired and lie down on the couch, the stereo image disappears completely and I hear everything from whatever side I'm closest to. Because the sides angle in towards the rear, they fit nicely in a tight spot. If I flip them so there is wider dispersion they are really jammed in and cannot rotate as much, plus the shorter depth of the bottom flat piece makes them a bit unstable. So the other night when I was digging some tracks high on black tea(!) I was wondering If I built another pair and stacked them on top of each other, like a vertical array, what kind of effect this would have? Would they need to be sitting in the wide position? Any thoughts?
I haven't touched this speaker for about 5 years but decided to whip up a quick and dirty passive crossover for it last night because a friend wanted to hear them at his house and I did not want to mess with a DSP setup. Just plug it into an amp and go is preferable.
Here is what I came up with as a rough first cut. Crossover is somewhere around 800Hz so still qaulifies as a FAST with the single SB65 full range doing most of the work in the vocals and upp range.
Schematic:
Prototype XO implmented with Wago connectors:
XO Curves - predicted (blue), measured (orange), woofer (red), green (tweeter):
It's rough but passable and listening to it, sounds quite decent. A wider frequency range shows that the bass extends down to 40Hz even though it is an open back type speaker with four 5.25in polycone woofers in series-parallel.
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Nice work X. I've been listening solely to my Trynergy and subs for the past year. It's a fantastic sounding system. If anything too much bottom. Mine has 4 6.5" woofers and also goes down to 40 Hz in my room. The staging is unbelievable and dynamics fabulous. I add the subs because I already have them and it gets me down to low 20's if I want. Mostly I listen to acoustic jazz, so it just fattens the bass a bit. Only after a year am I getting the itch to build something new. Considering the Asathor (15" and horn)
I have always followed XRK and his builds. Always impressed.
Tractrix horns came on my radar when looking to horn load a TC9 and saw your synergy builds. Recently they have come back on my radar as I'd like to build a synergy horn. Does the tractrix have benefit over the more conical type synergy speakers seen elsewhere? Ala the Danley horns?
Tractrix horns came on my radar when looking to horn load a TC9 and saw your synergy builds. Recently they have come back on my radar as I'd like to build a synergy horn. Does the tractrix have benefit over the more conical type synergy speakers seen elsewhere? Ala the Danley horns?
Hi Mortron,
Thank you for the kind words. The tractrix horn profiles seem to have better efficiency and load the cones really well. Because the are curved and gracefully expand to a full 180deg (at least in one dimension when doing a two panel horn), the horizontal direction has less diffraction effects vs a straight conical horn. They are a bit trickier to construct though. I am working on trying to a get a RAAL ribbon to smoothly integrate to one has been a challenge. Most of this might be related to the fact that the initial part of a tractrix has narrow parallel walls that might induce resonance dips.
Thank you for the kind words. The tractrix horn profiles seem to have better efficiency and load the cones really well. Because the are curved and gracefully expand to a full 180deg (at least in one dimension when doing a two panel horn), the horizontal direction has less diffraction effects vs a straight conical horn. They are a bit trickier to construct though. I am working on trying to a get a RAAL ribbon to smoothly integrate to one has been a challenge. Most of this might be related to the fact that the initial part of a tractrix has narrow parallel walls that might induce resonance dips.
I have a surplus of drivers. Pair of TC9fd, quad of those 6.5" poly buyouts, some BG Neo3 etc. I was considering a small foam core TC9 build for some desktop speakers, then open baffles with the Neo3 riding between a pair of 6.5" and then last night I came across your Ribbon/Synergy combo. It was inspiring.
Made me wonder about my Neo3. Not much of a housing on it, and can get close to the kids with minimal interference and the shape of the diaphragm lends well to a non-round throat, no? Maybe I'm derailing things and need to go elsewhere....
Made me wonder about my Neo3. Not much of a housing on it, and can get close to the kids with minimal interference and the shape of the diaphragm lends well to a non-round throat, no? Maybe I'm derailing things and need to go elsewhere....