What building my own speakers has taught me...

@erik_squires wrote:

What I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the crossover type did not matter.  None of the alleged pluses/minuses about noise and distortion in one versus the other have appeared as I transitioned.  So I call all the prior debates on A’gon on one versus the other more or less bunk. 

At least that’s your experience and opinion, and it’s one that I don’t share. Being as it may the important part in the context of this thread of yours is that you’ve found the best way to configure your speakers, namely actively (for other reasons that you’ve specified). 

A good crossover is a good crossover regardless of active or passive, but of course, the power and dynamic range benefits of active are present, but in a modest living room, where I probably never put out more than 20 watts I don’t know if it will ever matter.   

I mean, yes, I can do the math and I can get 110 dB at 1m now, but ... will I care here?  Probably not. [...]

As they say: headroom is your friend - with all that implies. 

These are now my second major active project, and I can honestly say I don’t ever see myself making a passive crossover again.  It’s too big of a PITA, with too expensive parts and too much soldering/wiring.  The relative ease of designing with DSP crossovers has completely won me over with no real down sides.

In a DIY-context sitting in the listening chair/sofa and making filter adjustments on the fly on a laptop/tablet is a treat. From my chair though it’s not only about ease of use but as well the breadth of use of a DSP crossover that offers the user different means to actually improve on the sonic outcome vs. a passive filter and config. 

Beautiful work!  Congratulations!  

Building even a simple speaker involves a slew of challenges that need to be solved.  These days it can be relatively straightforward with plenty of online help and solutions to known challenges and variables.  There's a known path to get started for the first few miles of this speaker building journey,  but it gets increasingly more difficult as the expectations of performance increase, and as we step farther away from that known path.  Making a really good speaker is increasingly more difficult than just making one that's "acceptably good", and making a great speaker is incrementally more difficult again because there's no longer a known path.  You're on your to own to test your problem solving skills, and to interpret how each step should be accomplished.  The final step of making a great speaker that's profitable becomes uncharted territory and gets exponentially even more difficult, so kudos to those who successfully navigate that terrain! 

The upside is that if you see the speaker development through (aka don't give up) and develop an aptitude for speaker building, whether profitable or not, a tremendous reward awaits those with a passion for this stuff.  You can voice the speakers to your room and equipment, and to your liking, and you can do it without spending as much as buying someone else's design at retail prices.  There's also a sense of pride that little else in this audio journey can offer.  

My view is that speaker building a great way to gain some insights that nothing else can offer, and I'd encourage anyone with the desire to at least pursue it at some level.  

@erik_squires  - Well done Mr. Squires!

Devin,

Yes, those are what I had seen.  These would be a piece of cake on a 3D printer assuming the selected filament has the strength to hold the weight.

In a DIY-context sitting in the listening chair/sofa and making filter adjustments on the fly on a laptop/tablet is a treat. From my chair though it’s not only about ease of use but as well the breadth of use of a DSP crossover that offers the user different means to actually improve on the sonic outcome vs. a passive filter and config. 

Definitely not the case with Hypex.  My Roon or miniDSP tools are a lot easier to hand tweak, but for these speakeers it took a lot of driver measurement and simulations, then testing for acoustic offsets.  You can get something that plays with just basic filter settings, but precision speaker design takes a lot longer.   

Still, the benefits of not ordering hyper expensive capacitors and coils, soldering them in and then deciding you want to make a change cannot be over stated. 

@toddalin 

I don’t run them as a dipole.  I think that the rear wave bouncing all around willi-nilli hurts imaging.

Mine are modified so that the rear wave is reflected back through the diaphragm totally changing the frequency response and adding detail like you can’t believe.

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I do, somewhat.  It’s worth experimenting a lot more, imo. Over 4+ decades, having tried them freestanding, with different type wave guides, and other combinations, on the set up I use now, I have sound coming from just behind my shoulders on both sides, in a reguar seated position. Its about as close to 3D I’ve ever gotten and none of my soft/hard some high frequency builds could match it.   I find the wave guides to be beamy and too focused for my taste, and less air around the sound stage.  It’s all a matter of preference. ESS Professional Series had a horn and that produced its own type of sound as well, projecting out and around like a good horn does.

One guy had his AMT Great Heils suspended mid air with cables floating above the speaker. In the right room, I would have liked to try that once.