Outboard crossover? Why not?

@erik_squires   Active vs. passive is not as easy as saying one is better. There's always trade offs.

Hi Erik, I agree that a competent crossover designer can come up with a very good speaker and yes better than a crappy electronic crossover and amps or better than someone that doesn't know how to use the active crossover properly,  but give me "or You"  any good crossover and amps and the crossover designer doesn't stand a chance. The improvement is always audible.

@timlub

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I’m sure you can do a better job than I could. I still see it as trading off. For instance, if I go all DSP happy, I need to find multiple DAC’s as good as I’m listening to right now and multiple amps with an ongoing explosion of cables. Also, DSP’s tend to be bandwidth limited. Getting a DSP that can do all your tweaks at 384/32 is no mean feat. Of course, this assumes we CAN take a digital signal and DSP it. I don’t know of any libraries for doing this with DSD on the fly.

If I do this in the purely active and analog domain, I’m forced to deal with power supply noise, and the addition of even more gain stages (op amps) than there was before.

To do the same phase and amplitude matching in DSP as in passive is still a challenge, though you can iterate a lot faster. In some ways I have an easier time with passive, I can tweak the filter Q’s up or down to trade phase and amplitude issues across the drivers in funny (and very useful) ways by altering values of caps, coils and resistors.

Maybe I need to look at the DSP manuals more closely to find this.

Still, I love being able to delay the tweeter in the purely digital domain. You can do some crazy work with that. Maybe this is my alternative to half-order slopes. :)

My message is just, there’s absolutely no free lunch with any option. Integrating any two drivers in the real world is no easy feat to do well, whether it’s in a single cabinet, or a subwoofer plus main speakers.

As for off-the-shelf units, I think pro gear is designed for a very different set of expectations. Of course, some is top notch, but a lot of it is for engineers putting together megawatt systems and close-enough is all they need. Any problems with the drivers and they'll hammer it right with EQ. Gaah!! I mean, I used to do this in theaters and it was fine, especially since you have such a variation in seating position, trying to get any spot with great phase alignment was nearly impossible.

So, could I take a "generic" crossover off the shelf and get to "working" with the speakers I"m listening to now? Yeah, in minutes, but no, I could not get the same quality of alignment and integration between the drivers.


Best,


Erik