How to design a high end crossover…

@teoaudio

My dream job, if I were still working, would be in high end audio. I truly understand what those people must go through, day after day now.

Create a crossover, love it until you hear George Harrison’s voice on All Things Must Pass, and get totally torqued at his transition between his normal singing voice and his upper range.

Go to this company’s website and look at their capacitor summation; it's brilliant and back breaking at the same time. They easily have to have $30k in caps to rate all of these at multiple mf's.

http://humblehomemadehifi.com

I'm stuck on this hobby for myself, gonna build my own speakers after I get my soon to come Omen's, but like my mentor said to me 45 years ago: You can learn this or become a doctor, it will take the same amount of time.

SMH

What one ends up finding is that it can come down to the tweeters being in the top spot re importance in good design, and that there are only a small handful of ’best’ tweeters available, period. Like five or six of them. Maybe.

The rest are just compromises with little room for fitting correctly and are just flash in the pan one legged single hit wonders.

Where even the $300/ea tweeters still need to be torn down and re-assessed as to their design and build choices, where they are re-executed to a higher standard.

we see things akin to this in all other areas of endeavor and technology - the requirement to take the best in components and move each to a higher standard. Cars being a huge one..

Loudspeaker design is no exception and this should come as no surprise.

You're in the past the future is DSP controlled active crossovers. 

digital for loudspeaker crossovers is a sack of effluent when it comes to absolute quality attainable.

I can’t help if it one can’t hear or understand that. maybe one needs to go back a class for a year or two. or maybe find a way to up their hearing skill set. Hint: Projection does not work, but self assessment does.

Digital might work in the future when it comes to moving to the top spot in quality but it is not there yet and I see nothing in the immediate future that changes that assessment.

If digital for crossovers worked as some might desire them to, then all the best loudspeaker companies in the world would be issuing product that way--right now. Note they are not.

I’m sure the wiser among them are playing with digital crossovers...but that’s been true for well over a decade. Yet, nothing issued. They are all waiting for the technology to improve to be close enough to meet what passive design can currently do.

Simply put: not yet. Timeline: indeterminate.

DSP active left passive behind years ago. Thankfully the professionals know it. The best speaker companies in the world are using active.