I checked out some photo's on the net of the crossover boards from Salk and PMC. The crossover board in the PMC PB1i is a stunning piece of work, very sophisticated with a generous amount of parts. Serious engineering. Looking at the crossover board in the Salk HT2-TL looks inferior to the PMC. Very skimpy with very little parts. Looks like a High School DIY project. Most speaker companies buy their drivers from Accuton, RAAL, ScanSpeak, Viva, Seas and SB Acoustics. The heart and engine in any damn good speaker is the crossover network.
PMC vs. Salk Sound Speakers. Which is better?
PMC speakers out of England have come on like a freight train in recent years including being awarded an Emmy for outstanding performance as speakers in mixing sound tracks for top motion pictures. Their high end home line of speakers always get good reviews but their prices seem very high compared to other speakers. Salk appears to make great speakers at much lower prices. For example, the Salk Veracity HT3 costs $6K and the PMC PB1i cost $14K. Has anyone compared these brands and which do you think is better?
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Audiozen - seriously? This is a stunning piece of work? http://www.avforums.com/forums/attachments/speakers/93494d1223327522-pmc-ob1i-crossover-ob1i-xo.jpg Plenty of electrolytics, iron core inductors, and $.25 sand cast resistors. Those are not high end parts, and just because there's a lot of parts doesn't mean it's any more engineered ... in fact the inverse is often true. More parts are often an indicator that proper engineering wasn't done in the early parts of the design phase. As a designer myself, there's no doubt in my mind the Salk is the better speaker ... and being less money is just icing on the cake. |
Vapor1..your point is interesting...explain this..I have viewed many photo's over the years on the net of crossover boards in many different speakers and one thing thats in common with the top speaker companies and models selling above $10K is that their boards are larger with a greater volume of parts and larger power supplies, and some have up to three large boards for the highs, mids and lows. Are you saying that these crossover designer/engineer's are designing larger boards that are not necessary and its nothing more than snake oil to convince the customer that spending a lot more money on high priced speakers is justified? |
Haha, no I'm not saying anything is snake oil or that anything isn't necessary. What I'm saying is that smart designers use as few parts as necessary to do the job perfectly, and no more. I was also saying that the majority of the parts on that PMC board are very inexpensive (and often frowned upon) parts. Salk doesn't use high-end parts either (although better than what's on that PMC board), but with a Salk you know you're getting a flat frequency response and proper phase tracking ... all with a crossover that's only as complex as it needs to be. That may or may not be the case with PMC. I've seen some PMC's that measure relatively poorly, and how it measures is a testimony of how well the crossover is engineered. |
Power Supplies? In a speaker? Vapor is correct, the number of parts is meaningless, in fact many excellent speakers have only one or two parts in their crossovers; some have none. Lots of parts can mean the use of correction networks to "fix" defects in drivers. Also, the use of electrolytic caps is something I avoid religiously in the gear I build, even in amplifier power supplies if I can. Printed circuit boards look neater, but in most cases that means you are connecting the parts with aluminum wires, not the copper or silver usually used in point-to-point wiring. Copper and silver are far better conductors than aluminum. |
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