I believe Danny will substitute an individual's choice of caps for the Sonicaps, recently saw one of his videos with Duelund CAST caps loaded on crossover. Physical space limitations are generally the greatest issue with using the best of best film caps, Sonicaps much smaller footprint, this, as well as cost likely the reason they seem to be de facto replacement cap.
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.
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I ripped out my passive crossovers in my Magnepan 20.1 and have an active crossover from Danville Signal Processing using the DSP Nexus 2x8 and apply room correction and time alignment via 12 biquads per channel. The results are stunning. Why bother with the passive components at all when you can do it digitally processing all 8 channels at 192kHz/24bit and get all the power of the amps directly into the speakers. It’s simply fantastic. Thanks, Steve |
The thing that Danny Ritchie loves best is Danny Ritchie and far too many believe him. But it sells, so bully for him. Of course nobody here seems to remember that the best crossover is an active crossover. Now if you put a passive crossover circuit in front of it, you add capacitors, resistors and inductors, which then give you a frequency dependent impedance curve which looks like a Coney Island roller coaster. And that's just for a tweeter high-pass circuit. Now when you add in mid and bass drivers, with high and low pass filters there... It's a real mess. But we're not done there yet. Nope. Many of your extreme hi-end loudspeakers add in equalization to their crossover designs, which makes that impedance curve even worse. This is very hard for an amp to properly manage. That's why people drop many, many thousands of dollars on things like Krell, Threshhold, Bryston, or Rowland Research solid state power amps. Now when you use an active crossover, an amp channel only has to manage a single driver. There's no passive, reactive component in between the amp and the loudspeaker driver. Then you don't need a megabuck amp to deal with it. Many of the best pro studio monitors are powered, with active crossovers and multiple amp channels. All of the Linkwitz loudspeaker designs use active crossovers. His designs have used both analog and digital crossovers. There are some digital crossovers that offer DSP EQ, which allows you to tailor the total system response for the room you are in. Then you're not just limited to whatever sound your speakers give you in the room you're stuck with. The lowest cost active crossovers are typically pro grade, from manufacturers like Behringer, dbx, Rane or even Nady. There are many manufacturers. Some of the best known home audio digital crossovers are from miniDSP. Even a Behringer active crossover is far superior to any passive crossover. Another major benefit is that you can use much, much lower powered amps when you use active crossovers. A lot of power is wasted having to push through a passive crossover. You really don't need to push many watts into a tweeter or mid-range driver to get a lot of level out. You could even run a single ended tube amp on your tweeter, and a mid-level tube power amp on your mid-range driver, and a solid state amp for the bass driver. You have a lot of options. |
@russbutton. Nailed it. Thank you. Mike |
Just as a point of reference -- there was a recent thread regarding ATC monitors where the ATC distributor stated that the active versions were superior to the passive versions. Yet several ATC owners stated that they strongly preferred the passive versions. Their consensus was the passives were more emotionally satisfying. Go figure. |
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