How to design a high end crossover…

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.

I don't doubt that. My studio stereo has one built into the amp, and it's just amazing. 
It's a Yamaha pro love audio unit, and fiddling that part of it from time to time, it just amazes me what digital can do, and I never thought I’d ever use that function, I just bought it to use as a cheap amp with a lot of watts.

@teo_audio

Yes, the highs and the mid’s are where you open your wallet and let the supplier take the money out, and thank God for that, since the higher in frequency you go, the smaller the mf needed. 

It's the difference between being familiar with what you’re hearing as opposed to seeing the musician perform in front of you in your minds eye. I simply can't believe that I am listening to the same speaker.

It all started when I stumble on DIY YT videos of people moding speakers for themselves or professionally by accident, and then start binge watching them. Danny at GR Research and a fellow named Joppe Peelen, as well as a bunch of others in the led me down the road to sin… 😂 


This is a random one from Joope: https://youtu.be/mcqVb08tgpo

The only speakers I own, or have owned, that I haven’t taken apart and modded are My KEF R's, just brilliant design and manufacturing quality that was beautiful to behold but I dare not fiddle with, lest I mess them up.

But yeah, I do take them all apart and check out pretty much everything just to see what makes them tick. That goes for just about any mechanical or electronic thing I own.

There can be a whole lot more than picking crossover points, slope, and particular components.  A lot of designs include networks to compensate for phase, to notch out certain frequencies, to fill in certain frequencies, etc. 

I saw an advertisement for the YG Carmel speaker that showed its crossover.  This thing had well more than a dozen caps, about a dozen inductors and a whole lot of resistors, and this is a two driver, two-way system.  Obviously there is a whole lot more going on than just a high-pass and a low-pass network.