There's a good chance it would end up sounding worse. The thing that keeps impedance under control is the amp, or rather the damping factor, and like chris says anomalies in impedance curves are no problem to a decent amp.
I'd steer well clear.
The HIFI site
I'd steer well clear.
The HIFI site
Not in a horn. The horn over-rides the drivers normal loading with it's own acoustic loading.
What's an impedance equalizer used for? I'd be concerned not on the peaks, but the dips along with the phase angle as it determines how deeply you'll be abusing the amp. This is a good read: Stereophile: Heavy Load: How Loudspeakers Torture Amplifiers
They are used by some in passive xovers/EQ to flatten(straight line) a driver(s) impedance over a certain range to help with xover integration/overlap between drivers.
There's a pink elephant in this room, but no one has brought him up directly.
The performance you can achieve with a DSP based line level x-over far exceeds lossy passive components that disrupt damping factor and efficiency. Not only that, but the cost of doing it at speaker level [as chris says] might even be half the cost of a DBX DriveRackPA+ that has 1000x the control for tweaking and driver protection.
It's huge and pink!
Please don't screw-up your sub with passive x-over junk.
The performance you can achieve with a DSP based line level x-over far exceeds lossy passive components that disrupt damping factor and efficiency. Not only that, but the cost of doing it at speaker level [as chris says] might even be half the cost of a DBX DriveRackPA+ that has 1000x the control for tweaking and driver protection.
It's huge and pink!
Please don't screw-up your sub with passive x-over junk.
I don't know that the original OP was intending to use passive crossovers on his sub. I hope not, since they just don't work.
I assume he was asking more "What's the use?" Presumably, the use would be to flatten the phase angle and present an easier load to the amplifier.
That is what Richard Small worked on at KEF at one point-conjugate networks to flatten the speakers' impedance and "make your amplifier more powerful" as the much-ridiculed marketing hype put it.
That assertion was probably true for many amps, especially lower priced designs. If you have some huge built-like-a-tank smartly designed amp, it may not matter.
But the missing piece of the puzzle is: do the fixed-impedance passive components really compensate well, when the driver impedance is changing with motion and self-heating due to input power?
In any case, conjugates at bass frequencies would be big and heavy and EXPENSIVE I should think, due to the large component sizes and need for high voltage handling. Probably cheaper to buy a bigger amp!
I assume he was asking more "What's the use?" Presumably, the use would be to flatten the phase angle and present an easier load to the amplifier.
That is what Richard Small worked on at KEF at one point-conjugate networks to flatten the speakers' impedance and "make your amplifier more powerful" as the much-ridiculed marketing hype put it.
That assertion was probably true for many amps, especially lower priced designs. If you have some huge built-like-a-tank smartly designed amp, it may not matter.
But the missing piece of the puzzle is: do the fixed-impedance passive components really compensate well, when the driver impedance is changing with motion and self-heating due to input power?
In any case, conjugates at bass frequencies would be big and heavy and EXPENSIVE I should think, due to the large component sizes and need for high voltage handling. Probably cheaper to buy a bigger amp!
The question was purely out of curiosity since I've used them in multi-way passive crossovers in the past. And yes the cost to build a true impedance EQ for a sub would come close to if not surpass $1000 usd which is completely stupid. Out of pure curiosity I'm going to measure a design with the most basic imp.eq setup, simply a resistor and cap in series across the + - leads before the driver which came to a grand total of $10 and will get rid of about an hour of boredom doing various measurements. The sim showed peaks came down by as much as 13ohms. My amplifier collection is pretty nice so that is not an issue (assorted Crest CA series, and a few QSC's that I picked up at a good price). As far as DSP I've got a Peavey MediaMatrix X-Frame88 w/an 8x8 b.o.b. It's all part of my PA/outdoor portable theatre complete with 18' Da-lite 16x9 screen 
A guy's gotta have a hobby right. Possibly live events in the future, in a past career I ran sound professionally but with the economy what it is there aren't many people in my area willing to pay $150/hr
A guy's gotta have a hobby right. Possibly live events in the future, in a past career I ran sound professionally but with the economy what it is there aren't many people in my area willing to pay $150/hr- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.