SoundMods wrote:
tomp wrote:
High crossover slopes will minimize lobing when you cannot get the driver acoustic centers concentric.
And you are prepared to explain how that can impact the sound quality? The goal here is reproduction of music and not getting around some technical challenge to make the speaker look good on paper.
Inquiring minds want to know.
I've had a DEQX for several years now. If you're not familiar with the DEQX products they provide an electronic crossover and room equalization all done in the digital domain. Since I'm all digital all the time this works out well for me. Several filter types are available including Linkwitz-Riley and Butterworth. I don't use the room equalization, but I did use the equalization feature to provide the low shelving filter that the NHT subs were designed to use.
At one point I decided to prove my theory that steep crossover slopes did indeed sound worse than the more typical 12-24 dB slopes. The results did not match my expectations and quite a few people agreed that the 96 dB slope crossover did sound better than the 24 dB slope I typically use. It does make sense, at least to me, that if different drivers aren't duplicating efforts there's less of a chance they will not be reproducing the overlapping frequencies identically. Two drivers with different characteristics will not reproduce sound identically no matter how well matched they are. They may be close, even remarkably close, but exactly the same? I don't think so.
A 96 dB slope crossover minimizes the overlap, you can hear the sound get cleaner and better defined as the slopes get steeper. That's what everyone I auditioned the test blind to said. There were no exceptions.
All that said, I'm using 24 dB slopes with the DEQX because I also want to be able to run the speakers full range from a single amplifier and I can try different things relatively quickly and easily with the DEQX that would take a lot of effort in the analog domain. I'll likely go back to 96 dB slopes when using the DEQX after I've finalized the analog crossover.
More comments on the DEQX vs. a passive crossover to follow.