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Dunlavy Minimum Phase Mods

Hi Everyone,

Came across an interesting virtual system here on Audiogon. The author claims (and I believe him) to have developed minimum phase crossovers.

https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/6692

It is very very rare to get to do an A/B comparison with the same speakers using minimum phase AND traditional crossover design. For instance, I can listen to a Vandersteen or Thiel, and compare them to a B&W, but that's not the same.

I'm curious if anyone has had a chance to hear them and opine as to how important this is to the final experience.

Best,

E
erik_squires
unsound
7,344 posts
 
Perhaps I'm missing something? Is this just supposed to be an academic exercise? It would appear to me that at great extra complexity and cost one has made what might be marginal improvements over the simpler, less expensive alternative?
erik_squires OP
16,676 posts
 
@unsound

That's kind of what I am asking. From a technical perspective, recreating a square wave, or near perfect impulse response with purely passive, multi-way speaker is really difficult.

Worthwhile?
unsound
7,344 posts
 

The original Dunlavy's didn't appear require that much complexity. As for me, I find that at I consistently prefer speakers that are time coherent to those that aren't. YMMV!

pryso
1,977 posts
 
erik, I reply not as an engineer but as someone who owned Duntech speakers for 19 years, auditioned several Duntech and DAL models, and had the pleasure of personal conversations with John on two occasions.

John Dunlavy was one of our most respected speaker designers.  He believed strongly in the benefits of time/phase coherent speaker designs and so all his models were based upon that.  To achieve that time/phase coherency with his multi-driver speakers required a rather complex crossover.

My advice would be to leave the stock crossover as is, or else find some other brand if you aren't satisfied with the Dunlavy and do your experimenting with that.  I believe you will only mess up your Dunlavy and likely ruin them for resale.
unsound
7,344 posts
 

^While I agree, there is added interest in that the mod was done by an ex DAL employee.

 In one of my last conversations with John Dunlavy he said he was excited by the potential of going forward with digital active cross-overs and individual Class D driver amplification. He did say that the he still waiting for better chips to work with and that the initial offerings would necessitate high development cost that would have to be passed on to the consumer. On the plus side; once that development occurred that it would eventually and progressively cut down on the labor costs. Remember each speaker that Dunlavy made at that time was made with complex cabinets, selected and sorted parts, and each and every speaker hand tuned to model specs. He expected to be able to eventually offer better products at much lower prices.

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