Undertow
I have heard that about vintage. The voltage used to be much lower than today.
The vintage thing turned out to be kind of a fluke. I have never been into vintage. I am not sure I am even going to stay there.
When I was selling my speakers the guy turned up to buy my speakers with an old Fisher tube amp. I was kind of chuckling. He hooked it up with crappy (and I mean crappy) wire and my jaw hit the floor. Those speakers though not perfect were wayyyyy more real sounding than with my gear or my new gear with the new speakers. I had also heard some mega dollar new tube amps and systems and never really thought much of them. Nice but never felt like real people were in the room.
Really I was ticked right off. This $300 amp and and ratty speaker wire was kicking my systems ass. So I bought the amp and that is where I said I have to know what is going on?! One thing that system had by nature was virtually no plastic. All foil caps in the amp and speaker crossover. I knew it was flawed yet it still had some magic that the new gear did not.
That is where I had to find out what was going on part by part. Even that article I posted (from Linn) that claims that 50% of the signal is lost in the crossover. That is a mind boggling number when you think about it.
So I have went from a crossover (Linn speakers) of cheap electrolytics, cheap caps, cheap circuit board, cheap iron core inductor to this in the Klipsch.
I am coming to Steen's conclusion the crossover is an area of almost unlimited weakness but I have had to go through it part by part.
Which comes back to Duelund I hope you can make Autoformers?