Well I also made 4 pair of speakers, they are all very good for the money, and yet, when I closely listened to expensive Adam monitors I think it will be very difficult to improve upon such deeply engineered speakers when working alone in a garage.
Of course it is a fun project, I wish you success.
This may be interesting:
http://www.visaton.de/en/bauvorschlaege/2_wege/studio1/index.html
I pulled my 12s out of storage, tested them in several orientations / mic distances. The spec sheet's FR plot seems real: the 3-5dB bump at 2.5kHz is their only flaw. Distortion was flat and low, all <0.5% from 300-several kHz, which is about as well as anything can test in my conditions (noisy PC etc).
Attached is a dodgy, no-baffle, in-room plot done with the driver pointing straight up. Green = raw, black = reflections suppressed. Blue = a very cheap tweeter, for illustrative purposes.
You guessed right (a post or two on) - I was looking at the non Be spec sheet. The Be driver is bling-tastic.
The Morel is still more directional. Attached are the plots, re-sized to the same scale, with the 3-10kHz range highlighted. The Morel's waveguide means the directivity goes a lot more low and consistent.
Cheers. Hope you do + post the outcome. I'm still trying to find the perfect project for the Faital 12" drivers; I picked them up on a whim.
Attachments
I don't know about 'a speaker designer' in the abstract, beyond publicly available articles and such.
Personally, currently. I'm using a mic + REW + ears. I fiddle with different points and slopes to get a pleasing result.
Personally, previously, I designed by textbook, then refined by ear (I had an SPL meter, but found it useless / frustrating beyond just checking that my levels were roughly OK). It took several years of slow changes to dial in my main system (coaxial + dual 15"). That has a simple passive crossover: a mix of 1st and 2nd order slopes, plus some padding / shaping of the HF.
When I eventually got a mic + software, I found it was pretty good: I tweaked part of the HF crossover, and otherwise left it alone. So my ears & judgement seem to be 'golden' enough to get good results (defining good here as sounds nice to me, sounds nice to GF, measures flat) - it just takes me an extremely long time.
Which goals? Depends on the build. For my current build, a system that:
A) sounds big and clear and effortless
B) does vocals very well
this current build was triggered by the experience of hearing a very good, rather large, fairly high $ boutique system that nailed A brilliantly (better than my main system) but B not as well.
Yes and no. Common example: a boutique pair of low resistance, low frequency passive crossovers might cost hundreds of dollars in inductors, and take weeks to get right. Not everyone has the cash or patience to work through multiple iterations of such crossovers. With DSP, one can just try a few crossovers and in a relatively short while have found something that works.
Specific example: my test rig has a HF driver sitting in the mouth of the mid horn, 30cm forward of the mid driver, delayed digitally. I can fiddle with this delay without mucking up anything else. That would be complex or impossible (and well beyond my patience) to get right with passive components.
So technically, it could be done 'no matter how or what', but in reality, I'd just give up on designs like this if I was forced to use only analogue filters.
That seems feasible.
I've heard very good things about the higher-end Adams, but I haven't found any place where I can listen to them. Plus, they look super cool. 😉
Not in my (limited) experience. I'd not be surprised if some pro systems exhibit this, rather than the individual drivers - since they are voiced to sound good at high volumes, in large, highly damped environments (rooms full of human meat), whereas home systems are not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher–Munson_curves
I believe these (linked Altecs) were the most widely used studio monitors in their day. Your favourite music may have been mixed on them. The 604 had gads of roll off by 15kHz.
1971 MONITORS
Also, see Zaph's soapbox at the bottom of the page, that covers this exact topic:
Zaph|Audio
Finally: with DSP, it ain't no thing to add 5dB of HF boost.
Agreed !
In a home application PA drivers have to be used differently than in a PA application. The latter one must be efficient, loud and reasonably compact (it is used to earn money after all). Meaning that tunings are used, that often don't offer too much low bass but offer good efficiency and make the best use of Xmax. When listened to at loud volumes this lack of extension is compensated for by the equal loundness curves.
For home usage it is better to use boxes that are often larger than optimal (from the "as much noise per watt" as possible point-of-view) and tuned lower. This will give less efficiency in the sought-after "kick range" for PA use but it will give much better low-end extension. But it will rely on room gain and/or EQing in order to achieve a flat response. I guess the EQ part is often left out by the ones complaining about "good only when loud".
Regards
Charles
For what it's worth, I'm using JRiver Media Center for all my crossovers and sending everything through a MiniDSP U-DAC8 to my amplifiers. The initial crossover setup was pretty easy to do, along with using PEQ to smooth response. I'm now using convolution to implement linear phase (FIR) crossovers that were surprisingly easy to create with rePhase. The learning curve wasn't nearly as steep as I expected before I started reading up on it.
-Chris
Being new around here, this kind of ugliness really turns me off to the site. I feel like saying much more than that but I'll just stop there.
You didn't even understand the sentence he wrote...
I do not have enough experiences to talk about Amphion, but I have had MM27 for 5 years+. The weakness of MM27 is its brutal nature and not very enjoyable to "listen to" the music. MM27 sounds much puncher than the other mastering purpose "soft sounding" MTM such as Lipinski L-707 (I used own a pair for a short period). Barefoot's primary purpose is recording / mixing obviously.
Yes we only exist on this site to fill in all the crossover 'details' for all you wanna be speaker designers, completely in one thread. What was "the sentence" I was supposed to address since ive forgotten?
what are you here for, critic of the DIYA sites posts?
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In well acoustically controlled room, MTM can show its strength better. Historically, point source speakers has been more popular in professional field than home use, and this is one of the reason, I guess. Also, good professional engineers are usually extremely conscious of the phase accuracy. Their ability to hear subtle phase shift is surprising.
Well, I'm currently using linear phase Horbach Keele (type) crossover with MTM. 🙂 It was not too difficult implement it for 2 way. Should be much more difficult for 3 way and more.
If you don't want to help people, don't help people. Acting like an jerk toward someone because they want to buy nice drivers just doesn't make sense.
I'm here to learn, which is exactly what I've been doing. But I'm also buying some nice ScanSpeak drivers to use in my project, so I have to assume that, to you, that means somehow I'm asking you all to do something for me.
There are a few people who have gone out of their way to help me learn. But nobody is filling in all the details related to any part of it for me.
I just don't get what you're so bitter about.
-Chris
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