Millercarbon's Mega Moab Mod Meander


One of the all time great automotive engineers, Norbert Singer, was a key player in every one of the 16 Porsche LeMans victories from 1970 to 1998. His dominance was such that at one point Porsche had won LeMans more than all other marques combined. This was all accomplished by building on the already solid foundation of Porsche production models. The air cooled flat 12 in the 917 was really two flat sixes combined to make 12. This car so dominated motorsport the rules had to be changed to stop it!  

So Norbert Singer modified Porsche production technology to extract the absolute most for racing. His legacy is today’s Singer Vehicle Design https://singervehicledesign.com Norbert doesn’t make for a very good car name so they called it Singer. What is a Singer? It is a modified Porsche. It is in essence a hot rod. What Norbert Singer did was make the most hot rod racing Porsche. What Singer does is take that to the next level, capturing every aspect of Porsche right down to excellence of design and aesthetics.  

I am not anywhere near the level of Singer. But that is the spirit of what we are doing: taking an already world-class design and hot-rodding it to be even better. Well, better for me anyway- or so we hope!

The early modders started with substituting off the shelf parts to get more power or less weight. That is pretty much all we are doing here. Would be cool if some day people are doing this with a lot more sophisticated approach. Maybe they will. Maybe even I will. For now though we have the current crossover project.

My approach is pretty simple: better parts sound better.  

This lesson was learned back in the late 90’s with Linaeum Model 10 speakers. The designer had a new tweeter and told me how to modify the crossover for it. Simple mod, one cap, one resistor. Bought the parts from Radio Shack, put it together, sounded like crap. Absolute horrid crap! Called him up, he said those parts are crap. Said Musicap, Vishay. But they measure the same? Just do it. I did. It worked. Even though they measure exactly the same, the sound difference is off the charts.  

Even though they measure exactly the same. There is a lesson here. For those willing to learn.

So this is the essence of it: Eric Alexander has made a speaker the equivalent of a Porsche 911. Even better: an affordable Porsche 911! But after a while with my 911, after learning what makes it drive and feel the way it does, it was only natural to change the shocks and torsion bar and other items to bring out even more of what I like so much about the 911.  

That is what we are doing here. Hot-rodding a speaker. Thank you Rick for the metaphor!  

The parts are on order. Next week the fun begins!
128x128millercarbon
What made me stop in my tracks was the new GT8 is air cooled with no turbo......   Got to trade mine in now.
The new Turbo gets more power AND glory out of a 3.7 flat 6 than Aston Martin squeezes out of a 4.0 twin turbo V8.
Must be the culture.
Hope you can make the speakers sound better! Look forward to hearing how they improve!
With the Linaeum mod the difference was night and day. The kind of experience guaranteed to shatter anyone who thinks all you need are measurements. Granted, the difference was huge. I knew nothing back then and so bought a package of ten resistors for a dollar at Radio Shack. The caps were probably more like 5 for $2. Absolute crap.  

BUT think about it- this is exactly the same stuff you see inside the vast majority of components!  

The sound with Musicap and Vishay was so much more clean and clear and liquid it was mind-boggling. But then that was going from utter crap to very good. Not absolute best just very good.  

Knowing how much difference these things make, when Talon came out with the X crossover I went for that upgrade. This time the improvement was not as immense as before because we were starting from a higher level. Would be nice to know how high but the stock crossover was potted and glued in to where nothing was visible! Still, it was clear they used some pretty high quality parts, all point to point soldered direct to each other.  

So this will now be my third crossover upgrade, and by far the most ambitious. With the others the designers told me exactly what to do. With this one I already have the Upgrade Option crossover. There is no higher level to just order and connect like with Talon. So a fair amount of work has gone into figuring out what parts to use and how exactly to go about this.

Eric has done a really good job of building a crossover that is very much like the rest of the Moab, very high performance for the money. Still, there is a reason people like Encore and Ulf. There are always higher quality parts and those speakers make good use of them. That is basically what I am doing here, only focused on the crossover. The experience of hearing past crossover upgrades combined with the things I have learned doing this one has me thinking that as good as these things sound now they are gonna be even better- or else I sure wouldn't be going to this much trouble and expense!