Good to know - next time. The tape did help by keeping it somewhat open while feeding in the cables. The end result is very nice- I ‘borrowed’ from your cable builds- thx.
No complaints from the better half ++ vs the red/black cables. When we built this house I asked the architect to place both speaker wall mounts for bi-wiring cables, as well as power outlets on the sides of the fireplace, in case I went with powered speakers down the road. He wasn’t a speaker guy but put them in.
That’s fucking fantastic, sir!! Bravo on you.
The Sound of Silence - finally
I’ve had this low level (non-gain affected) hum in the woofer section of my bi-amped builds. I’ve pulled and rewired everything with upgraded interconnects, and still the noise continued. Interestingly no issues with my Amp Camp Amp for the coaxial (quiet), but with the Legacy 4bloc amp? I sent the Legacy back to check for repair- no issues found. I even tried a hum eliminator plug for the Legacy- nope. All equipment is plugged into a Furman sequencer / conditioner so single source ground, but something was being picked up from the miniDSP into the Legacy and out to the woofers?
So I just went with the updated miniDSP Flex, their balanced unit. I have yet to refine the DSP settings (just set initial HP and LP filters to protect the drivers) but quiet as a mouse. So, so nice to turn on my system and to listen with my ear at the speaker drivers (with no music playing) and hearing NOTHING.
Some days working thru active crossover measurements / settings are a blow-out (granted my old age vs some software setting ? that’s out of place…). At the end of the day, I’m going with re-setting REW and miniDSP back to original, and starting over.
Anyway, Grok is suggesting the best LP / HP 1st order btwn the 1.5way woofers (bottom W with 2.75mH coil) and the coaxial is 420Hz (per specific drivers, sizes, open baffle design, etc). Vandersteen went with 1st order, so I’m looking at making an active 1st order btwn woofers and coaxial work. Again, the mid of the coaxial runs full above the active (i.e. no LP) and the tweeter has a passive 2nd O HP. It’s a bit of a mess at this point so best to come back another day.
A fresh start with REW settings today.
I still need to work on getting dB levels in line with measured, and to adding some eq boost to the low end, but a first for me, anyway, with a 1st order (electrical) between the woofers and the coaxial (gotta keep up with the Vandys…). A little phase preservation…
I got a lot of work done with the active filters / voicing.
One real issue with active is potentially over pushing the low end, but by running calculations you can come up with a decent balance between low-end extension Xmax and dBs, as it would be very easy to exceed Xmax at volume (the limiting driver in my build is the 10in woofer, and it helps a bit that the 12in .5 way with more excursion is a tad more sensitive). And, just as important imo, I didn’t want to mess up the 18dB/octave roll-off of the open baffle. Sealed and ~transmission lines exhibit a slow roll off of 12db/oct, ported and PR with twice the steepness ~24db/oct, and open baffle combo of driver and baffle ~split the difference (porridge that’s not too hot, not too cold, just right).
As such, a nice tool I found helpful is to first set target frequency curves in REW (yellow line in pic below). In the case of the low-end I set a 3rd O (18dB/oct) target at 34Hz (down 3dB at the corner) which gets me nearish to 28Hz at -10dB, and 30Hz at -6dB. Not a perfect match, but it’s a target.
Yeah, the target function is a great tool. I wish a template could be set up to apply it to each measurement instead of having to set all the parameters every time.
Yes, and if you find a workaround plz let me know.
