How good is the crossover in your loudspeakers?


 

I just watched a Danny Richie YouTube video from three weeks ago (linked below). Danny is the owner/designer of GR Research, a company that caters to the DIY loudspeaker community. He designs and sells kits that contain the drivers and crossover schematics to his loudspeakers, to hi-fi enthusiasts who are willing and able to build their own enclosures (though he also has a few cabinet makers who will do it for you if you are willing to pay them to do so).

Danny has also designed crossovers for loudspeaker companies who lack his crossover design knowledge. In addition, he offers a service to consumers who, while liking some aspects of the sound of their loudspeakers, find some degree of fault in those loudspeakers, faults Danny offers to try to eliminate. Send Danny one of your loudspeakers, and he will free of charge do a complete evaluation of it's design. If his evaluation reveals design faults (almost always crossover related) he is able to cure, he offers a crossover upgrade kit as a product.

Some make the case that Danny will of course find fault in the designs of others, in an attempt to sell you one of his loudspeaker kits. A reasonable accusation, were it not for the fact that---for instance---in this particular video (an examination of an Eggleston model) Danny makes Eggleston an offer to drop into the company headquarters and help them correct the glaring faults he found in the crossover design of the Eggleston loudspeaker a customer sent him.

Even if you are skeptical---ESPECIALLY if you are---why not give the video a viewing? Like the loudspeaker evaluation, it's free.

 

 

https://youtu.be/1wF-DEEXv64?si=tmd6JI3DFBq8GAjK&t=1

 

And for owners of other loudspeakers, there are a number of other GR Research videos in which other models are evaluated. 

 

 

bdp24

 

The above responses are not uncommon. Loudspeaker voicing, spectral and timbral characteristics, the basic sound of a loudspeaker company’s designs is understandable and to be expected. Richard Vandersteen has a sound he goes after, as did David Wilson. Everyone claims to be trying to achieve the "accurate" reproduction of acoustic instruments and voices, yet every designer makes a line of speakers that makes recordings sound different from that of other designers.

Danny Richie has addressed the above arguments (the term not used in it’s pejorative sense) in some of his other videos, and does so again in this one. His argument is: Would a designer think to himself "I know what would make for a good sounding loudspeaker; I’ll operate two drivers in such a way that they are out-of-phase at the crossover point where the output of the two drivers meet, the result of which is a 12dB hole in the loudspeaker’s frequency response?" Danny says "No, no loudspeaker designer thinks that."

If you look at John Atkinson’s measurements of the Eggleston models that have been reviewed in Stereophile, you will find the same "hole" in the frequency response Danny did when he measured the model a customer sent him. Is a frequency response hole (12dB down from the speaker’s midean output) a loudspeaker voicing choice, or a design fault? In this video Danny Richie gives you his opinion. You are of course free to disagree with it, and even like the sound of an Eggleston speaker.

I myself have never heard one, but I find the topic of loudspeaker crossover design an interesting and important one. Is a 12dB hole in a loudspeaker’s frequency response a "Problem that doesn’t exist"? The "corrections" Danny came up with for the Klipsch models sent him by customers have been incorporated into the Mk.2 iterations of those models by Klipsch themselves. The crossover ideas Danny suggested and offers for Magnepans are now offered in Magnepan’s own "X Series" upgraded versions of some of their models. Are the X Series versions a solution to a problem their standard versions don't have? Is Magnepan cynically catering to a gullibility they know some audiophiles fall for? C'mon, you know Magnepan better than that!  

  

Post removed 

Viridian, 

Where’s all the vehemence coming from?  Danny Ritchie backs up all his statements with measurable evidence. Do you distrust the science of loudspeaker evaluation?  He has applauded good speaker performance, even from affordable brands like Polk Audio, and has found fault with some sacred cows. He shares many of our favorite beliefs…that parts quality matters, but his core values are based on solid principles that Floyd Toole would agree with. I put him in the objectivist camp with Amir and Erin, but with some voodoo allowed. 

Post removed