Hi Everyone, After spending a lot of time and not a small amount of money on crossover components (I have scads of them now) I decided to bi-amp my Altec Lansing Magnificents. They are the 7 cubic foot (around 200L) cabinets with the improved Altec 15 inch drivers as upgraded by Great Plains Audio (with the alnico magnets) and Radian 475PB horn drivers on SEOS 15 inch wave guides. Awesome components. The crossovers were all large gauge air core, quality poly caps and non-inductive resistors. I tried several arrangements, slopes and crossover frequencies. None really made the speakers sing like I thought they should. So....bi-amping with (gads
) a Behringer solid state precision crossover. I used a pair of EL84 mini blocks on the Radians and the original EL84/KT88 Oddblocks for the woofers. After much testing with a PC, calibrated mic and most importantly my ears I settled on an 1850 HZ crossover point. The 15s actually are flat (unreal) to just below 4K, the 475s reach to 800HZ. The built in slopes are 24 db / octave symmetrical and I adjusted the levels for top and bottom to match. The speakers were best in phase. Now the speakers sing. The basic issue is that I appear to be extremely sensitive to phase and time delay in speakers. Crossovers are the worst. It is slightly possible that I could use a first order and get by, but the drivers would not be suitable for that. So to soothe my vacuum tube spirit, I pretend that the Behringer has lots of tiny tubes and just listen to the music.
Good listening
Bruce
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