In my ever so humble opinion, there are speakers out there that are selling used for way above what they are worth a sound wise, simply for no other reason than they are on somebody's radar screen. There are other vintage speakers that are not only better sound wise but represent excellent values because they are not on the radar. Do a search on the vintage Wharfedales I previously mentioned. I bought my W70's locally from an estate sale for $222. I scored a pair of W90's for $600 with furniture grade cabinets in mint condition. These are some seriously good speakers that have bass that you can play pipe organ music through. You typically would want to keep an eye out for when Wharfedales come up for sale in your local area. The plywood backs are sand filled to assist with resonance damping. This makes them extra heavy to ship. Being off the audiophile radar means that they do not command high prices on the used market. They usually cost more to ship than they sell for. Because of this, they most often are sold for local pick-up only. I find that most of speakers from the 60's have nice wood cabinets. If you do your own woodwork, check out Fraiser speaker's, like the Dixielander's, really nice high sensitivity as small club P.A. speakers. They are in plywood cabinets and could be covered with a nice exterior veneer. Just some ideas...
But I was really jonesing to hear them! And they're the first 4ohm speakers I've had. Which created a whole bunch of new questions. And so here we are I'll read up on those Wharfdales. I've also tried out a few others: Marantz Imperial 6G, Large Advent, KLH 17 and 6 (still waiting on the 6 to get done), Dynaco A-25 and A-35, and a few others. Sort of my own auditory tour of speaker history. Or at least a portion of it. May consider dropping in KLH 5, 23, AR-2ax, or AR-5 into this process but I couldn't very well go out and buy ALL those at once. I'm happy to purchase these where I can get good deals, get them professionally refurbished, listen to them, learn about them, keep what I want, and then send the rest out into the world. I can do this only because these speakers are all relatively inexpensive and I'll recover most of the cost of what I get rid of. Anything more expensive will have to wait for my education and experience to catch up. I don't like going out and buying expensive things. I like learning along the way and building an understanding. That's half the fun, I've found.
If I do mod the AR-3as it will be done in such a way that they can be very easily restored back to original condition w/original parts. If it turns out the mod requires more invasive surgery, perhaps I'll just consider bi-amping with the project speakers I mentioned before which will have a custom cabinet, circuitry, etc. I do care about the collector value. See I do listen Either that or I'll do it with my heresies. I plan to make custom backs for those anyway out of baltic birch. I'll just leave the stock backs as they are and set them aside. The wiring can be very easily adapted/restored.
Thanks for the info and pictures. Much appreciated. The Ninka's sure are easy to set for any kind of amplification you desire.
I agree with you on biamping AR3's, wouldn't do it but disagree on electronic active crossovers with multiple amps as a path forward. Been there, done that, and it was sweet. Going back too!
Did the dsp crossover thing several years ago when I did a decent set of DIY speakers. I built regular crossovers in a separate case so I could disconnect anytime and use dsp. While using the dsp at first was fun and you could do all kinds of measurements with a Mic etc and adjustments tweaks on and on and on. It got old real fast because I could not leave well enough alone, became more about tweeking than listening. Those speakers are now in a home theater setup never to be messed with again.... I have since sold all dsp gear, mics etc as well.
Question, this is just about the "power robbing" aspect of passive crossovers (not sonic passive component compromises), if you had huge SS monoblocks, say Levinson 33's, with huge reserve power, would the power robbing aspect of a crossover matter much?
I've heard some say that in certain speaker designs the crossovers may take as much energy to "drive" as the drivers themselves.
Make nice bedroom or den speakers. Ideally suited for smaller rooms. They don't sacrifice on sound quality and sound better and more natural than the more difficult to drive AR's and do it for about a quarter of the price. A nice thing about vintage speakers from this era is that most have damaged cabinets from over the years of wear. But the internal components remain in almost perfect condition. Because of this, they are routinely parted out on eBay. Drivers are readily available at very reasonable prices. The W60's make excellent speakers for jazz. The whole line is quite good at playing all types of music. I've run them with 60's vintage EL84 family amps. They sound good and can play loud without requiring large amounts of power.
This is my experience with digital crossovers. Fun tools, too bad it simply didn't sound as good as it was fun to play with all those tools!
thanks for the explanation. mine is vertically bi-amped. i tried the horizontal. it was better than bi-wire. but i felt more impact going to vertical. ive switched it back and forth and remain vertically bi-amped.
Respectfully, tweaky-but-fun strikes me as way too casual a dismissal of an extremely powerful speaker-designing/building tool. That’s not to say an informed decision against digital as a permanent crossover solution wouldn’t be completely valid. But, what if someone at the beginning of the process were to follow this lead—and as a result, miss out on a huge learning/growth opportunity? Let’s be realistic. As a design and implementation tool, a digital crossover will allow you to accomplish in a weekend what it would take you a lifetime to do with a soldering iron. Digital is absurdly more efficient—but also way more effective by virtue of the instant feedback it delivers on changes in crossover frequency/slope/Q, phase, EQ, time-alignment, etc. Not sure how this could be trivialized as something overly tweaky or merely fun. I think a fair assessment would capture a little more of the game-changing power a digital crossover puts into the hands of the amateur speaker-builder.
Can't argue with you, digital I didn't mean to diss although I did. Learning tool as you state, wow yes. Can be way better than I experienced, have zero doubt. Just my one.
This where you are steering an amateur in a wrong direction. As you say it is a powerful tool and no amateur is going to accomplish anything in a weekend, sorry not going to happen. And all I was merely addressing was my personal experience with it, like I said it was fun and worked fine but for me it became more about tweeking the system all the time, which is what you do and I would focus more on that than actually enjoying music. I have built crossovers and used dsp, the former is beyond hard but dsp, when used to its full potential and done right is chore in it self even for the experienced. P!ease do not make it sound so easy as pie because it is far from that for an amateur. You can make wonderful sound with it but for a green amateur dsp and measuring can be quite daunting regardless of what you say.
I think messing around with a DSP based crossover would be easier than building and tweaking a PLLXO - if the goal is to determine best crossover frequencies and slopes for a given speaker setup. Then again, this judgement comes from someone who finds it easier to setup a tetra-amped system than to post pictures on stevehoffman.tv.
It is definitely easier than building, but in the hands of the inexperienced it is not as easy one is led to believe, especially if starting from scratch, ie measure drivers etc. etc.
If the losses due to the passive crossover were just a straight linear function vs frequency, then yes, I would certainly buy into your notion of just simply throwing more power at it. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The inevitable impedance swings that the woofer presents to the low pass filter means that the frequency response is colored in addition to the idea of simple attenuation. The primary fault being, what some people appear to call, the "evil" iron-core inductor. In truth, in this case it's not because it's iron-core, but rather ANY inductor there is the source of this error. It just happens that a vast majority of speakers have an iron-core, er, excuse me, "evil" iron-core inductor there.
I agree that diving into bi-amplification is not as easy as, say, plugging earphones into an iPod to listen to music. But, Soundgarden appears to have an enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. With that mindset, overcoming hurdles and obstacles are a challenge to be met, not to be discouraged by. Well, in my opinion. But, I do agree, this topic is more difficult for the novice than just whistling dixie. I don't feel we should discourage his interest.
