What do you think of passive crossovers?

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I'm sure some will scoff and say that 0.2dB is impossible to hear, and I'm fooling myself, but that's what I've found time and time again.
By following your precedent period I find that pretty normal.
Talking about overlap region and watching the graphs ,mentally and...graphically the two curves must ( should) sum to be flat. So each driver's contribution is summed algebrically.
Probably a square law of the overlapping region :p
I mean, the summation happens at any combination of the two possible 360° phase rotations of each driver and that may determine a certain timbre.
Just interference, in a crude way. I wonder how the use of ribbon tweeters especially those described by lowmass, might be preferred.
 
Simon, I followed a similar path to yours. Get the speaker right with the crossover (active or passive) then do room EQ with the DEQ2496. I probably cheated some with speaker correction in the DEQ. :p
Yes I've cheated by applying some speaker correction on a passive design at higher frequencies using active EQ in the past too... :p

However the important point is that the speaker correction at higher frequencies was based on gated measurements of the speaker on a measurement stand not room influenced measurements, while the low frequency corrections below <200Hz were based on steady state/ungated room measurements taken with the microphone at the listening position and the speakers in their normal locations.

So although both were being done by the same DEQ, the way the measurements were performed for the two corrections was completely and utterly different.

I still prefer to keep speaker and room corrections segregated though, this makes it much easier to adapt a speaker to a new room as theoretically only the low frequency response should need a new correction.
I understand Ben's approach to build it all into the crossover, but I find that a little clumsy for me. I have heard it done to good effect purely passive, so many approaches work.
I wouldn't even attempt to try to compensate bass room modes using a passive network. The components would be far too big, expensive, and lossy to do it, not to mention a huge pain to set up.

The lowest I'm willing to go with a passive network is a 250Hz crossover, or baffle step correction.

Anything lower than that either has to be adjusted by optimising the speaker itself (selection of the bass alignment, height of the woofer from the floor etc) or with active EQ as far as I'm concerned.

Turning a knob on a DEQ to tweak a bass room mode notch until it is cancelled just right is far to easy to want to do that any other way!
 
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My Solen (passive crossover parts) order is arriving. This will be an interesting day for me. I get to pit my beginner's first inexperienced passive design (from scratch, nonetheless) against active miniDSP. I won't stand a chance against LR 48dB/octave or FIR, but I'd expect a proper match between my design and stock LR 24dB/octave. We'll see who will be left standing very soon.

It will be a good fight because I get to tune the frequency response and the phase relationship with the passive and all the stock miniDSP has is steep slopes.

Of course, above a certain threshold, brute force seems to always win.
 
My problem with active are:

1. Too much DSP processing may mess up the original signal. A lot of DSP proponents don't seem to mind but I just feel that there is no free lunch. When you apply 48db slope to get your ideal phase match and so on ..., it has to do some damage to the original signal. Gods don't play dice or in this case Gods don't want you to mess around too much with his original intents. You can't just willy-nilly dsp and not expecting doing something negative to the sound.
2. You can't try your active speakers with your favorite tube amps
3. You certainly cannot do vinyl with active
4. There are reasons why people like dCS and Conrad Johnson go to the nth degree to make those high end components.
5. In the end, I think active will get you something very good, but the best speakers in the world will always be passive albeit at a high cost. Nothing free.

Now back to my #1 above, I am probably not the only one. It seems like some people now are going back to R-2R DAC because they think delta-sigma DAC do too much signal processing on the original signal. Some of the R-2R can be pretty expensive. Personally I have not listened but people who have saying that it's like removing a "glass layer" from the sound. Kind of like removing the last layer of Ms. Kate Upton swimsuit.
 
Too much DSP processing may mess up the original signal....
I think you've made a typical DIYaudio mistake among your list of grievances: sweating the small stuff and missing the big stuff.

Specifically, seems horrible to me to stick a crossover in the middle of the music band (as is almost universal here) and then sweat trivialities like phase, transistor sound, small FR variations, etc. Best to have a good driver handle the middle five octaves and keep the driver crossover points low enough and high enough to be outside the sensitive zone. (Which incidentally, mirrors the bands that woofers, mids, and tweeters can handle well individually.)

B.
 
I think you've made a typical DIYaudio mistake among your list of grievances: sweating the small stuff and missing the big stuff.
.

I think that is one way to look at it but there are other ways to look at it too. I've listened to speakers with nice and impressive bass and so on but after awhile I got bored with it. To some people it's the small things that stick.
 
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3. You certainly cannot do vinyl with active
Sure you can! And many here do. Active can be analog, of course - so no worries, but I ran a digital crossover for years with vinyl into an ADC then passed to the digital EQ and crossover. 96K/24bit. Works like a charm. :up:

Here is my "wacko" passive take. It seems to me - thru listening to many systems - that using a single amp for the entire spectrum just sounds better. Sounds "right", sounds more natural and more like real live sounds than splitting up the signal among multiple amps. I know that it shouldn't and can't explain why it does - it's just my experience. Makes no sense, but it's what I hear. :beady:
 
My problem with active are:

1. Too much DSP processing may mess up the original signal. A lot of DSP proponents don't seem to mind but I just feel that there is no free lunch. When you apply 48db slope to get your ideal phase match and so on ..., it has to do some damage to the original signal. Gods don't play dice or in this case Gods don't want you to mess around too much with his original intents. You can't just willy-nilly dsp and not expecting doing something negative to the sound.
2. You can't try your active speakers with your favorite tube amps
3. You certainly cannot do vinyl with active
4. There are reasons why people like dCS and Conrad Johnson go to the nth degree to make those high end components.
5. In the end, I think active will get you something very good, but the best speakers in the world will always be passive albeit at a high cost. Nothing free.

Now back to my #1 above, I am probably not the only one. It seems like some people now are going back to R-2R DAC because they think delta-sigma DAC do too much signal processing on the original signal. Some of the R-2R can be pretty expensive. Personally I have not listened but people who have saying that it's like removing a "glass layer" from the sound. Kind of like removing the last layer of Ms. Kate Upton swimsuit.

Hi Andy2,

1.Whoa! Whoa again !!

2. Sure you can.

3. Sure you can.

4. I own some of that gear ... good stuff, CJ.
Albeit I found it's audible contributions to be minimal in comparison to good speaker processing...(be it active or passive) ;)

5. Active or passive is immaterial IMO; implementation is everything.



Your points strike me more as 'analog vs digital', than active vs passive...

In my mind, once you leave a phono cartridge (or tape) as the signal source, you are in the world of digital....

....which means you've gone DSP active no matter what downstream passive components you stick in ;)
 
Sure you can! And many here do. Active can be analog, of course - so no worries, but I ran a digital crossover for years with vinyl into an ADC then passed to the digital EQ and crossover. 96K/24bit. Works like a charm. :up:

What I meant is that you can certainly use vinyl with active by convert it do digital signal via the ADC but what I meant was that you probably wouldn't want to. The reason most people use vinyl because the lack of any digital source so passing it through the ADC is sort of defeating the purpose.
 
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The reason most people use vinyl because the lack of any digital source...
Not sure it would be "most people" but maybe most hardcore audiophiles, sure. BT-DT, all tube audio chain, including the recording and mastering. It's fun and a point of pride. So I certainly understand the desire to keep it analog and even all tube.

You can still do active very well without digital, don't forget.
In my case, I used vinyl playback because I owned so many old LPs that I loved. Going digital didn't seem to kill the charm. But - see above. ^
 
You can still do active very well without digital, don't forget.
In my case, I used vinyl playback because I owned so many old LPs that I loved. Going digital didn't seem to kill the charm. But - see above. ^

I know what you meant by doing analog active, but I was speaking in the context of DSP active. I can see the discussion could get more complicated where one was talking in term of analog active while others are talking in term of DSP active. While I didn't read every posts in this thread, I got the impression that most of the discussion here is about DSP active.

But with respect to analog active, I can see it would be easier to implement complex analog filter but it sorts of going back to the same argument of simple filter vs. higher order filter hence it's the same thing all over again.
 
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