HELIOS Speaker Kit

@rop45 Glad to hear your Helios kit is living up to the hype!! It’s always refreshing and reassuring to know that I wasn’t crazy when I fired mine up and realized they were better than some $10K commercial speaker designs I have heard recently. Keep us posted on the final build. I used either a 19” or a 21” Pangea Audio stand for mine and it definitely smooths out the tweeter response and widens the soundstage. Vocals should be centered just above the tops of the speakers which a very spooky affect that gives the impression of a singer elevated on a stage with you in the first or second row! Truly magical!

@mijostyn You are correct that the Helios crosses the woofer higher and the tweeter lower to overcome the usual challenge of a 2 way design using a larger woofer for bass extension at the expense of linearity. With that said, Jeff Bagby has managed to overcome that challenge with careful use of the PR to control woofer excursion while also adding a little to the low bass response which with my setup, the sub comes in at 40hz and is barely noticeable because the Helios digs quite deep before needing help! Jeff said he tested them to 113db and the distortion was so low that it boarded on immeasurable! That is why you use a $500 tweeter and $400 bass driver. 

@boostedis Wrong strategy. The ONLY way a small woofer has of making more bass is by increasing it's excursions. Price has nothing to do with it. Longer excursions create more distortion, much more distortion in the most sensitive part of the midrange. Read up on Doppler distortion. Systems set up like you suggest are only good at very low levels, turn them up and they become painful to listen to. If Jeff handed you that line of garbage I suggest you sell them, he has no idea what he is talking about which means he has no idea how to design a loudspeaker. 

If you want to clean things up and add some headroom you get a digital two way crossover and cross over to your subwoofers at 100 Hz. If you only have one buy another. There is no other way to make a small loudspeaker sing at high volumes. Right now you are croaking.

Mijostyn you are beginning to sound a bit rude and boring.  Would it make you feel special to tell me my lunch doesn't taste good, hahaha!!!

We are saying the speakers sound great, and you are saying they are croaking, yet you have not heard them.

The designer had extensive experience designing speakers and provided the designs at no charge.  He wrote that the distortion on these was so low it was difficult to measure at normal volumes.  In fact, the lowest he has ever measured.  He said this speaker design may have been the best he ever built.

The manufacturer, SB Acoustics, asked him to make this design for an audio show and it received a lot of positive feedback.  One of the reasons I purchased the kit - all the comments I read from people who heard the speaker, not one said it was "ok", "not too bad", but every comment used words like "amazing" and "best ".

Jeff Bagby was one of the most talented speaker designers to ever hit the DIY community.  All of his designs have been carefully thought out and perform very well--both by ear and by measurements.

To say that "he has no idea what he is talking about which means he has no idea how to design a loudspeaker" is shameful and uninformed.