How do you high pass your main speakers?

@ddrave44 

Yeah. The more I think about my options and how they fit into my setup, the possible cost and how it will affect the sound quality, the more I think that tweaking the bass array crossover point seems the way to go.

Thanks for the feedback.

I tried a Bryston active high-pass between my Ayre preamp and amp and didn’t like the resulting sound. When I asked Ayre about it, Charles Hansen castigated me for placing an active component between his preamp and amp -- a zero feedback issue. He did approve of the passive balanced Marchand 80 Hz 24 dB high-pass I now use, and the Ayre sound is preserved.  A Velodyne SMS-1 provides acoustic room correction for a pair of HGS-15s.

Every speaker is different, so is every crossover point. Example, the KEF Reference 5 speaker crossover is set at 350hz and 2800hz,  but the KEF Reference 5 Meta crossover is set at 450hz and 2100hz. Even a small change in design can change the the crossover settings.

I tried a Bryston active high-pass between my Ayre preamp

Same result with a different pre, just sounded off.

@dbphd 

I am glad to hear that Charlie Hansen (RIP - another bicyclist lost too early due to a vehicle incident) approved of the passive balanced Marchand high-pass filter that I recommended earlier in this thread.  That filter seems to do no harm in my system.

The effectiveness of using a high-pass filter, and the best-suited cut-off frequency and slope, will be largely dependent on the main speakers.  Main speakers that do well handling high current and rolling off at their lowest frequencies without issue are possible candidates to be run full-range with a sub rolled in at an appropriate frequency.  Main speakers that do not do well at the lowest frequencies, and speakers where the bass driver(s) also handle midrange duties, are more likely to realize a sonic improvement by using a high-pass filter to limit the depth of the low frequencies that need to be handled by the mid-bass driver.

My Aerial LR5 speakers offer the advantages of being a 3-way design (where the low frequency drivers do not also handle the mid-range) and having bass drivers that extend low, down to around 40Hz.  They are also quite dynamic and designed to handle high power.  The designer, Michael Kelly, suggested running them full range and rolling the Aerial SW-12s in to fill in the lowest frequencies.  I have found that set-up to work well but when something else in my system (DAC, preamp, cables, etc.) results in a more bass-heavy presentation, then adding the Marchand high-pass filter (45Hz cut-off) between my preamp and amps does seem to help without causing a sonic penalty.