Setting up the Nathan 10

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#241
gedlee said:
This is back to the practicality situation. High slope passive crossovers are not practical and active just adds too much cost. The errors solved by high-slope active do not appear to justify the high cost.

So much of these discussions are "apples" to "oranges" because we are talking about "cost effective" versus "ideal". I find the outrageous sums often spent on audio systems to be a real problem. The goal to me is "cost effective supurb quality". Thats what I believe that I have achieved and what I claim to produce. I am not in the "cost is no object" camp of audio design and I never will be, because that is all just an academic exercize of no real interest to me.
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Designing an active version of the nathan, using custom active crossovers and small amps (class T?) could be both cost effective and attractive for studio monitoring applications. High level (both in terms of power and quality 🙂 ) passive components are quite expensive.
 
#244
pos said:

Designing an active version of the nathan, using custom active crossovers and small amps (class T?) could be both cost effective and attractive for studio monitoring applications. High level (both in terms of power and quality 🙂 ) passive components are quite expensive.
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We looked into this at Ai, it WAS NOT cheap. I would guess that such a modification would easily doubling the cost of a Nathan.

I used to sell Summas with a bi-amp option and would spec the crossover, etc. In practice we had more trouble with and never got quite as good of a result with active as we did with passive. Bigger companies do active because people expect it AND they make a lot more money on the bigger ticket.

In Bangkok we did installations both passive and active and in the end they worked about the same - but the active cost more. The one thing that we did notice was a higher incidence of driver failures (all CDs) with the passive. In hindsight this was obvious to me. The active was less likely to clip and there was no natural bandlimiting of the clipping frequencies in the passive case. So the clipping moved the spectrum upwards in frequency and this overloaded the tweeters. The solution was simple to NOT clip the amps, but with the guys in Bangkok this was not a possibility. Clipping was part of "their sound" and they had to have it. Today I would limit the spectrum of the signal seen by the CD in the crossover and probably double its power handling, but thats academic with Ai down.
 
#247
Had to use double face PCBs for 500W passive cabinets so that the paralleled 20W resistors would not slip out of connection when the heat on their legs was melting the solder on a single layer PCB...
Active is security and control in high SPL wars.
 
#256
Bioacoustics research software from Cornell http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/software

Raven http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/raven/Raven.html (cross platform)

Sound Ruler http://soundruler.sourceforge.net/main/ (cross platform)

MATAA http://www.audioroot.net/index.html?analysis/mataa.html (cross platform)

Visualizer http://www.nugenaudio.com/products.php (cross platform)

I'm not sure if these do what you're looking for, but they were the first to turn up after Googling 'sound analysis software os x'.

markus76 said:
Is there a list of apps capable of that? Again OS X apps preferred.

Best, Markus
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#257
markus76 said:

Don't know what's going on at 650 Hz - could be the rearwall reflection.

Best, Markus
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If your ears/mic are 10-11 inches from the wall behind you, reinforcement will occur around 650 Hz (half wavelength). A typical foam absorber (Auralex, Sonex, etc) will not eliminate this, only attenuate it somewhat when you're that close to the boundary.

Try a very substantial absorber, like a batt of R-13 fiberglass behind your seat to see (-er, hear) if you get a different result. It would need to be big: 3 feet wide x 2 or 3 feet tall. This should also significantly improve imaging as well. If the foam you are using is only a 2x2 tile, it's really not big enough to do the job below 1,500 Hz

It is also possible that imaging anomalies will occur due to very unmatched "sidewalls," as is the case in your room. Unless they are very diffusive, far away, or absorbent, you'll have some balance issues.
Remember that the speaker's directivity only solves the issue of the nearest sidewall. The sidewall opposite each speaker is intentionally in play for ambience/envelopment/spaciousness. You may be getting more ambient cues from one channel than the other, which might confuse imaging.

Or speaker polarity mismatch? Even inside the box--it happens. A little obvious, I know, but . . .

There is an answer. You'll find it.

--Mark
 
#260
"Obviuosly people here HAVE NOT seen other systems vertical responses..."

Actually it seems this would highlight the one weakness of WG vs conventional systems - the requisite wider vertical driver spacing and associated nulls.

Though beyond the nulls the superiority of CD would be evident.
 
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