It's all good, @mrdecibel I'm having some of those thoughts myself. I am going down the route of very small Class D amps, with very short speaker cables.
A speaker stand with room for an amp?
I have rather large 2-way stand/bookshelf speakers and I'm thinking of going 100% active with them. They have an external passive crossover already, so there's nothing to rewire internally. What would be nice is if there were room for a small Class D stereo amplifier to be hidden in the stand. Even better if it was adjustable for angle.
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@yogiboy - Excellent recommendation, but about 5-8" too short I'm afraid. The general form factor is perfect though. I think I should have gone looking at Butcher Block first, they have what I need with their speaker stands, even better if I can have them put a third shelf in below the top shelf. |
Since this project is to convert my two way speakers from using passive crossovers to active I would like to have 1 stereo amplifier under each speaker and use one channel for the tweeter and another for the woofer. In an ideal world, the DSP crossover and stereo amp would be one unit, but I will probably end up with a crossover under the processor, and run a pair of balanced cables to each amplifier. |
@erik_squires wrote:
Good initiative. It’ll give you a bearing for sure what’s in store sonically with active config. of your mains compared to them being passively configured, but will it be more of an initial experiment only or (being open-minded about) a potential attempt at an all-out approach eventually? I’m asking because like any endeavor in home audio reproduction, if you want a true assessment of a given configuration/design direction you have to give it a bloody good shot to know where it stands compared to other approaches you’re already familiar with. For one it appears you just started out on this active endeavor with the mains, and as such it is of course an experiment that can’t be decided upon in the blink of an eye whether to continue with ahead even more seriously. I know it was an experiment for me when I bought an extra pair of speakers + extra power amp (I had the Xilica DSP already) and started fiddling with active config., but it didn’t take long to realize it was the way to go. It will be interesting to see what your findings will be here, but as you no doubt know assessing that potential also reflects on the amp and DSP choice of yours, apart of course from the overall implementation of the filter settings, but I take it you have a pretty good grasp on these aspects. My "warning" here would be not to base your findings to heavily and/or quickly in light of the class D amps and DSP chosen (not knowing what they are, sorry), but it should give you a bearing nonetheless.
That’s another place to experiment: vertical (like in your case here) or horizontal active bi-amping. Vertical offers shorter cable lengths, but I wouldn’t let the desire to minimize cable length dictate that choice. It’s obviously system dependent and a matter of preference. I opted for horizontal active tri-amping (incl. subs) as that which sounded the more natural to my ears. One of the benefits of vertical bi-amping, as I see it, is that it naturally makes you use the same amps for the two driver sections, in both channels of course, whereas horizontal bi-amping sees many using different amps to the respective driver sections. Not saying that can’t lead to good results, but personally I find it’s paramount to use similar topology/brand/series amps top to bottom - even with the subs - to aid overall coherency and tonality. Just saying that using similar amps with horizontal bi, tri or whatever-amping is an equally intuitive option compared to the one that is naturally given with vertical ditto.
When you say that (i.e.: "In an ideal world"), do you mean to keep komponent/chassis count to a minimum? |
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