I have Altec 604Cs. Good speakers but they were not known for the crossover. I got a pair of Mastering Lab crossovers and had them refurbished with new caps. They have mid and upper shelving. Made a difference.
My room is semi-anechoic.
All speakers have a little EQ built in
It may come as a shock to audio purists but part of the work of a crossover is level matching as well as tonal adjustments of individual drivers. Ahem. That's what we call equalization.
This is true whether the speaker uses active or passive crossover, and may be in place just to adjust phase matching in the crossover range.
Also, curiously, while companies may brag about the number of parts in their crossovers, more parts does not indicate more quality. It may just indicate more equalization had to be done to the drivers to get them to match.
- ...
- 39 posts total
| Post removed |
bruce19AR-2ax’s were my 1st decent speakers while in college. LP’s, FM, listened to the nightbird when working late or all night I just restored two pairs of them. 1st sounded so good I got a second pair. restored the crossovers and replaced the L-Pads for tweeter and mid volume adjustments. they sound terrific, using in both my office and garage/shop systems. 2nd pair came with new tweeters, I replaced the tweeters on the 1st pair. a fine example of the advantage of level controls
everything you need is readily available, do a simple 'ar-2ax' search on hifishark.
|
I would have a very difficult time replacing a variable L-pad instead of just soldering in fixed value resistors. I’ve seen too many of them go bad. Maybe with high efficiency horns that have very little power applied this could be reliable, but not for me. One theme that comes up a lot when I look at old speakers and the crossovers is that we have much better tools but also different tastes in sound reproduction. Part of what makes new crossovers (especially for Infinity) better is we have tools to simultaneously track impedance and frequency response. Part of it is that sometimes (ahem, Infinity) makers just didn’t care that much about slapping in different drivers. It’s also true though that our listening tastes have changed and mastering engineers along with them. Then there's the Kef Reference 1 Meta and..... WTF???? |
Eq is the great equalizer. It’s true. Most all room acoustics + imperfect gear performance means things will almost always come up short to some degree until some form of correction is applied. Not only that, but chances are you won’t even know it until things are finally corrected properly and compared. |
- 39 posts total