Ferrofluid

Hi @katman well, I do agree that in a perfect world, active crossovers are always better than passive crossovers. There are a few scenarios where they are not, I’ll give you one quick example.

When designing a speaker, I always use the crossover slopes that will achieve the best alignment more the given drivers that I am using.

I have taken drivers and used Linkwitz 12 or 24 and just could not get rid of a hump or a dip or maybe achieve a good phase response, Switch to Butterworth 6/12/18, same, switch to Bessel or Chebechev... yada yada. It can take alot of work to get the best out of a crossover design. I have yet to see a electronic that give the flexibility to change apc/cpc slope types and rolloff.

I believe that there are several threads here that tackle the subject. If you don't find them, you could easily start that thread. 

Again, if all the stars fall into alignment, electronic crossovers are definitely better. I hope this helps. Tim

No, won’t start another thread. My thought was , if you have a quality, well designed speaker , going to active bi/tri amping is more likely to improve things that 

than trying to “improve “ the crossover which isn’t likely to improve anything . Most likely, in this situation , best thing to do is nothing .

One way to make those speakers sound better is to temporarily hook up an old avr with room correction , turn off all tone controls and try to get freq response flat ( +\- ) by changing speaker location, angle and adding /removing room conditions .

Then, get rid of that avr.

tattooedtrackman

Thanks for a great post-question here

I also have the Matrix 800s speakers and love the sound. I looked into replacing the ferrofluid some time ago. Contacted B@W North America they would not do the work here in the states. They wanted me to ship them back to England i passed.I remembering that they told me that there is only one type of ferrofluid to use in the Matrix 800 speakers and any other would cause damage to the tweeter. What the specific brand or type is i do not remember.  tattooedtrackman Please keep us posted with your journey.

timlub thanks for all your great info. Where are you located? 

I'm  in the St. Louis area

@68pete I definitely will keep all updated. Looking forward to hearing some really nice improvements in about a month.