Acoustic Zen Crescendo speaker crossover capacitors ... who makes them?

Ha! Charles, I can’t resist😀 I do honestly believe the bass can be improved with even the low cost battery bias mod. I know JBL and Vandersteen do it with great results. Peter who makes wonderful PBN speakers also shared it would be an improvement. The thought of those poor sounding $5 electrolytic caps will never settle well with me.

The bias mod would cost about $150 total.  I think that is a modest investment for improvement. Plus I learn and execute a new mod that would be fun.

You are right that the dreaded caps still manage to produce great bass.   Design is always the most important factor.  This parts thing is next, but still important. 

Mapman and Granny,

The type of capacitor used depends on where in the crossover it is used, in some cases the only reasonable solution is to use a Electrolytic capacitor.

http://pbnaudio.com/speakers/speaker-kits/scanspeak-b741

Use the above speaker design as an example, in the bandpass for the midrange driver there are two series capacitors and two shunt capacitors, the two series capacitors certainly in a speaker this quality needs to be metalized poly propylene 100uF is a standard value and the 180uF is made up by paralleling 2 each 90uF capacitors, the two shunt capacitors both are 27uF, since this is a relatively small size it only makes sense to use polypropylene here too and luckily 27uF is a standard size too with a pretty tight tolerance too as compared to an Electrolytic capacitor. Now for the Impedance correction network in parallel with the midrange driver, here a 820 uF capacitor is needed - the only reasonable choice is an electrolytic capacitor, in this case to get the 820uF, 320uF uF is paralleled with 500uF and then I typically use a small value polypropylene to bypass with, something like 3uF

Good Listening


Peter

I understand completely Peter. Thanks for sharing that link. I love the idea of building a nice kit like that. Great idea. I think the designer of my speaker did what was reasonable with the bass board. No doubt about it.

I like thinking and planning on ways to improve what is reasonable and done with perhaps more cost constraints in place for the builder.