The little bump at the arrow doesn't worry me as much as the elevated levels in that region in general. Peaks at 3-4 kHz tend to be like an ice pick to my ears. Maybe that one's narrow enough that it's not an issue, but from a design standpoint, I'd typically push the highpass up a little, jiggle the Q, etc. to try to eliminate the peak at ~3.5 kHz and push that region down some. Obviously I don't have your speaker in front of me, so I can't judge what it sounds like, just what the plot looks like and what that has meant to me in the past.
Of course some listeners prefer a brighter/more revealing presentation as well, so it might suit them.
Of course some listeners prefer a brighter/more revealing presentation as well, so it might suit them.
Beware of posting commercial projects in this area of the forum. For now the thread can stay here, but may be moved later depending on the direction it takes. Generally speaking, projects in this area are a form of open source. Enough info is supplied for others to build it.
I meant that there is some degree of "BBC Shoebox Monitor" design heritage in this design. Primarily, the 5.25-inch woofer rather than a 6.5-inch woofer, and the shoebox Form Factor. The other major resemblance is that the assumption is Nearfield listening. Two iterations ago, my Small Monitor design was, like the LS3/5A, a sealed box, but the tradeoffs were not to my liking, and most of my Golden Ear friends agreed.
Or, did you mean something else?
john
Thanks for your concern. I have hopes that the design could be offered to the public as a built loudspeaker, but I know enough about the business to know that that is not likely. There's a quote attributed to the British art critic John Ruskin:
There is hardly anything in the world that some man
cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper,
and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.
But when you are selling stuff on Amazon, Price is King.
Is it really worth it to have the Litz-wire internal wiring factory-terminated by Cardas? Bobby Palkovich of Merlin Audio thought so, and I have been told that he also had his wires cryogenically processed, as do I. Mongolian Cashmere Longhaired Sheepswool, instead of Polyfill? And so on.
Now, to a degree, Technological Progess and Economies of Scale have undermined Ruskin's dictum. My hat is off to KEF for threading the needle of Boutique Quality with Reasonable Pricing. The burden that the Market places upon any design such as mine is to justify the price increment over KEF. And I mean in terms of Sound Quality, and not "Pride of Ownership."
I had a one-on-one chat with a SVP-level guy at a Household Name high-end audio electronics manufacturer (part of a famous "group"), and he cheerfully admitted that his products did not have the "best sound," but they did offer the most "Pride of Ownership." Yecch.
To wrap this up: You wrote:
Enough info is supplied for others to build it.
Well, there is very little under the Sun that is new. Except for things like Purifi's "Hair-Scrunchi" surround, and KEF's flexible port tube, loudspeaker design today is mostly about combining known technologies in fairly obvious methods. I do read patents all the time (Thanks Voice Coil!), and perhaps there still is room to get a patent in some new Bandpass alignment. But, I've been mucking around at least as a hobbyist since the mid-1960s, and long ago I decided that the Patent Office grants a certain number of patents just out of pity, or to make people think they got something for their filing fees.
ciao,
john
Lol…..I’m not even sure why this thread exists….,it would appear to me that the OP has more experience and a better design assisting team than most……why ask us our opinions at all? The golden ear fellas are going to be the ultimate benchmark of performance anyways. This will surely be met with harsh criticism and I should have resisted the response, but it’s Friday the 13th so what the heck……I’ll test me luck.
I stopped using my account for years, but I can't help but comment on the level of delusion and self righteous rhetoric from a completely deluded OP. If this isn't trolling it's the finest piece of stupidity I've ever seen.
It doesn't matter what well established designs you claim to draw inspiration, who you know or how great they are. You've put your worst foot forward, the crossovers you're proposing are worse then 1st attempt amateur, they have no merit.
"I'm not charging for my design time"
Goodness grief, at least you got the value of that bit right.
It doesn't matter what well established designs you claim to draw inspiration, who you know or how great they are. You've put your worst foot forward, the crossovers you're proposing are worse then 1st attempt amateur, they have no merit.
"I'm not charging for my design time"
Goodness grief, at least you got the value of that bit right.
Not everyone works in the same way. Some people are obsessed with the technicalities of modeling and pushing that to near perfection before building something. Others want to listen to the drivers as soon as possible to see if they have any issues that aren't apparent from plots. Those kinds of things do exist and no amount of equalization or crossover twiddling will fix some of them.
My read on the thread is that he wants to get to an intermediate prototype with a more suitable crossover to do more extensive listening (not a perfect crossover, not a perfect design, not a perfect anything in anyone's head). If that pans out, he'll enlist someone to do a more thorough design. I'm not sure why that's so offensive. And honestly, I don't want an explanation of why it's offensive. The back and forth about the motivations for the project are unlikely to change anyone's mind or actually get to the bottom of anything. They've been the least interesting part of the thread to me.
I'm not in anyone else's head, and I often feel like I don't understand half of what goes on in my own.
My read on the thread is that he wants to get to an intermediate prototype with a more suitable crossover to do more extensive listening (not a perfect crossover, not a perfect design, not a perfect anything in anyone's head). If that pans out, he'll enlist someone to do a more thorough design. I'm not sure why that's so offensive. And honestly, I don't want an explanation of why it's offensive. The back and forth about the motivations for the project are unlikely to change anyone's mind or actually get to the bottom of anything. They've been the least interesting part of the thread to me.
I'm not in anyone else's head, and I often feel like I don't understand half of what goes on in my own.
That's a pretty generous read. He asked for commentary on the 3 potential crossovers from solen, he got commentary on the crossovers (no ad hominem) then got defensive and said he and his friend were some kind of expert. Many rolled their eyes. Just another day on the inter tubes.
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You may not be able to post the full design for commercial reasons, but I'd be asking Solen for the following:
1. What target system sensitivity are they aiming for? Normally, we don't normalise system responses to 0dB, but instead a 2.83v drive level.
2. What enclosure tuning option has been selected? It seems to me closed box as we see a typical 12dB high pass on the woofer. Are you pairing this with a subwoofer? as you won't have a lot of bass output
3. Your frequency response is +/-3dB which isn't as flat / accurate as it could be. Solen should be aiming for +/-1.5dB with these drivers
4. Did Solen give you any off-axis responses? You'll want to see there are no nasty peaks or lumpy DI especially around the crossover region. Spinorama data would be useful as well as a DI curve.
5. For LR target curves, you should get a nice aligned phase response meaning proof the drivers are in phase throughout the crossover region - so you should be given system plus individual driver phase data in the design
6. Did Solen ask you for what room environment you are aiming for? This may help shape / slope the target response depending on how lively your room acoustics are. Same goes for baffle step compensation (when considering nearfield listening, or close to front wall / in bookshelf placement).
1. What target system sensitivity are they aiming for? Normally, we don't normalise system responses to 0dB, but instead a 2.83v drive level.
2. What enclosure tuning option has been selected? It seems to me closed box as we see a typical 12dB high pass on the woofer. Are you pairing this with a subwoofer? as you won't have a lot of bass output
3. Your frequency response is +/-3dB which isn't as flat / accurate as it could be. Solen should be aiming for +/-1.5dB with these drivers
4. Did Solen give you any off-axis responses? You'll want to see there are no nasty peaks or lumpy DI especially around the crossover region. Spinorama data would be useful as well as a DI curve.
5. For LR target curves, you should get a nice aligned phase response meaning proof the drivers are in phase throughout the crossover region - so you should be given system plus individual driver phase data in the design
6. Did Solen ask you for what room environment you are aiming for? This may help shape / slope the target response depending on how lively your room acoustics are. Same goes for baffle step compensation (when considering nearfield listening, or close to front wall / in bookshelf placement).
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I'm not so sure.
If you use the curved line array making the focal point in front of the speaker as shown, then a -ve Z would be toward the listener / mic.
I'm pretty sure the Driver delay tab plus per Z setting on the driver in the crossover tab work as follows
+ve mm / usec = away from listener / mic
-ve mm / usec = closer to listener / mic
X-over pro is not useful software to design crossovers with, it is only slightly better than an online calculator. Even within it's limitations, I see no indication that these xo suggestions are based on actual measurements in your cabinets. The problems have less to do with flatness of the curves than they do with faulty assumptions and poor inputs leading to unreliable or meaningless modelled output. Given all of that, the crossovers supplied by Solen are at best useful as a starting point to tweak from, and that is being charitable.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but that these issues didn't jump out at you suggests a beginner-level understanding of speaker design, and that you aren't capable/comfortable doing your own measurements and modeling. If my assumption is faulty, forgive me, and consider posting your measurements, but otherwise, my advice to you will be based on that assumption:
1. Fiddling with these crossovers doesn't help the 'professional crossover designer' in any way if the final product is to be a speaker designed by a modern 'measure/model/test/iterate' process. They will want to do a full set of measurements and design from those, and Solen's crossovers do nothing to further that process. If you take this approach, the listening, measuring, tweaking, and iterating usually happens towards the end, not upfront.
2. If you enjoy that tweaking and listening process then by all means go for it, but be clear on what you're doing and why. There's a certain market for a 'designed entirely by ear & tweaking' speaker, but I highly suggest marketing it accordingly when you commercialize.
3. Assuming you want the modern (#1) design approach, IMO, the most useful thing you can do to move the design along is complete the construction and send the speakers, without crossover, to the designer ASAP, so they can get on with the real work of measurement, modeling, and iteration.
4. I would also suggest that any time you intended for #2 would be more productively spent learning how to do basic impedance measurements with DATS or similar, gated FR measurements with an inexpensive calibrated microphone, and modeling in VituixCAD or similar.
There's plenty of information on this forum and elsewhere on how to do #4, and I suspect many would be happy to help and answer your questions about it.
As it stands, reading through this thread, an uncharitable observer could get the impression of an entrepreneur wanting to sell high $$ speakers to his rich audiophile friends, lacking the skill to design them, and hoping to save money on design services by crowdsourcing the design out to DIYers. Crazy, I know! But this actually happens surprisingly often on these groups, at least as far back as the "US Enclosures" guy on the BASSlist. So posters can perhaps be forgiven their suspicions 🙂