Speaker crossovers and their impact
Subscribe to Ask Paul Ask a QuestionHow important to sound quality is the crossover in a loudspeaker? If you want to improve an old pair of speakers, can you just replace their crossover components?
COMMENTS
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The GT Audioworks speaker does not use any crossover. If you have not heard this speaker, you owe it to yourself to have a listen. They are not inexpensive but will compete with almost any speaker available.
Most (single driver) headphones have no crossover too! And my personal experience with some crossover-less sigle driver widebander loudspeakers told me: passive crossovers simply degrade the sound quality, not to mention the problem of getting multiple-driver multiple-way loudspeakers playing phase coherently. The only solution for minimizing these problems I can imagine is a high resolution active digital crossover with dedicated delay settings for the drivers mounted on the same baffle. A much more expensive solution to get drivers phase-aligned can be found in the top range Wilson Audio speaker series.
Having designed and built a few DIY speakers over the years, I can attest to the difference good quality crossover parts can make. They can be especially beneficial to older speakers that still have bipolar electrolytics in the crossover, which weren’t that great to begin with, and have likely fallen way out of spec. over the years. You can easily outspend the value of the speaker for new crossover components, but most decent quality polyprop film caps and air core inductors can offer large improvements in the resolution, imaging and dynamics of almost all speakers. I have found great improvements in my beloved Magnepans, which are admittedly built to a price point and what parts you can fit inside a panel. Re-creating the stock crossover with better parts in an external box wasn’t convenient, but it made a great speaker even better, with seemingly zero downsides, except keeping my somewhat OCD self from continuing to futz with it!
Cheers
Phil
Phil – Progriff – I was thinking the same thoughts in your post when I viewed Paul’s post early this AM.
My experience with replacing caps has been about restoring wonderful and quite old speakers, from Dynaco A-25 to DCM Time Windows in my collection. Replacing the ancient electrolytics was required to make them playable and I was not trying to improve upon what was built 40+ years ago. As you can imagine, the web has a plethora of articles and schematics on crossovers for the old stellar speakers, with users experiences on cap, inductor and and internal wire replacement.
Of note, I find that most speakers manufacturers in the 70s and 80s never contemplated their cabinets being opened up. With YouTube and the DIY blogs, we can benefit and learn from others cabinet opening fiascos.
stay safe
Peter
Agreed Peter! I remember the Time Windows as the first speaker that really impressed me. A model well worth saving. Cheers!
I’m currently reworking the crossovers of my DIY speakers (17 years old) and am in the 4th or 5th phase of experimentation. I use the fantastic information on capacitors and their sound quality from http://www.humblehomemadehifi.com/. See the pages on Capacitor Testing. The latest generations of caps from numerous manufacturers are excellent, however it may mean spending some serious $$. In my view, it can be worth it, but some skills are necessary. Some of the capacitors are much larger in physical size (for same value) so I’ve had to build new layout boards.
Also, Danny from GR-Research does videos on improving speakers so check him out at https://www.gr-research.com/
It’s extra work but why not try an external crossover. Microphonics do matter so taking parts out of the speaker enclosure matters and it solves the problem of new, better, larger crossover parts. It does add the cost of a small box and some short speaker wires.
The crossover is not in the speaker. It’s in the wide base attached to the bottom. The base plus the isolation feet placed the speaker drivers at the correct height for my situation. To access the crossover, I just “flip” the speaker over and I can make changes to the crossover without removing the layout board. There’s lot’s of room for larger parts – I just wanted to caution others that better parts may be larger.
A little over three years ago, I took a pare of Welton USA speakers and rebuilt them with higher quality parts.
From the drivers, right down to the crossovers.
Granted that I got all the parts from:
https://www.parts-express.com
for the drivers, I used Peerless drivers, and Dayton Audio crossovers.
The crossovers use both mustard and electrolytic caps.
I tell you what, those speakers really got transformed in to a brand new pare of speakers.
They sound better now, then they did, when they were first made in 1997!
Does anyone know why the more expensive caps sound better? You can spend a lot of money on caps, well over $100 ea.
I understand how tighter value tolerances would help but is there anything else measurable?
I just finished my first DIY speaker build, Continuum II’s, and I’m very happy with the sound but I wonder if I would gain much from upgrading the $3.00 Audyn caps to something more exotic.
You have to read what each cap manufacturer states, plus read what HumbleHomeHiFi explains. It has been a given for decades that caps in the signal path cause damage to the music, so a great deal of engineering has been done and in my experience the results can be dramatic if your audio system is revealing of such improvements. I started with $3 caps and have been through 3 generations of better caps, while my audio system has gotten better and better. I bought a set of commercial speakers earlier this year ($4K US), hoping they would be a fun change. But they lacked detail,etc so I sent them back. I peeked inside at the crossover and was appalled at the cheap parts. Those speakers made me feel like I had wasted a large amount of money on my PS Audio DAC and Power Plant. So my general advice is: inexpensive caps/inductors, wire, etc are for modest systems and it’s a lot cheaper to upgrade crossovers (if the speaker drivers are good quality) than buy new speakers when the rest of the system is being improved significantly.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll experiment with some caps. Luckily the speakers are easy to get inside of.
I hope it goes well for you. I’ve also changed inductors from wire wound (air core) to the flat foil design with good results. These inductors were before the mid/low freq drivers (series) and the foil units provided more energy in the music. I’m now changing the other inductors (parallel) to foil units.
Another key area is the connectors on the speakers. It all depends on your budget and how much you want to learn while improving the sound. For years my budget was modest so I did almost everything DIY.