For a while I've been leaning more and more towards the idea of powered speakers with active crossovers. The speakers I have in mind at the moment (Linkwitz Orions) have four drivers each, two of which are identical, and so would require either six (with the two identical drivers in parallel) or eight amps in all. I think the advantages of such an arrangement are pretty clear, but that's not exactly what I want to get into in this thread.
In general terms there are two options for the cross-overs - analogue or digital. It seems to me that digital has the edge, for several reasons. First, it's much easier to adjust in case the speakers are replaced or the technology evolves in some way. Second, the same box can perform digital room correction (but this can be also be done with the SB using Inguz' plugin, for example). Third, and this is the issue I want to ask the forum's opinion about, it's possible to create digital crossovers which don't introduce any phase changes. For example a square wave in will be a square wave out. Contrast that to an analogue crossover, for which a square wave in produces a very distorted signal out in the time domain (but with *zero* harmonic distortion). On the other hand an analogue crossover is much cheaper, and in the case of the Orions one was designed specifically to match them. So my questions are: 1) do people believe these phase changes are audible? Ohm's Law of Hearing and most conventional wisdom says no, and demonstrations such as this one: http://webphysics.davidson.edu/faculty/dmb/OhmsLaw/Ohmslaw.html and other more scientific investigations seem to support that, but I'm not fully convinced. 2) irrespective of the answer to 1), is it worth trying to preserve relative phase during audio playback? The answer might be no, if in the process of recording and mastering the phase has already been messed up. This (at least naively) seems probable, since microphone locations, the mics themselves, filters, etc. will all affect the phase. 3) what digital solutions are available for such an application? The only one I know of which would work out of the box is the DEQX (TacT seems to only have two outputs, and I'd need six at least). -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31590 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
