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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Basic guide to advanced audio

Post Subject: Wave lenght and xoverPosted by Jorge on: 7/29/2011

Haralanov, I guess you mean to say disconnect the tweeter on one side of your playback? not the whole left side of the playback...

When you use compression drivers it is very important to design the horn taking care of the high frequency response. I have seen very expensive commercial setups with huge midrange horns. This big horn will not let the higher notes escape the horn and will start to sound dead at 5 khz. In addition to this it will load the driver down to a lower frequency where it has no busisines going; this will damage not only the high frequency response of that driver but also the mid range, unless a higher lever xover is used to cut off the lower range, and this again will kill sound. This is why the sizing of the mid range horn is extremely important.

My midrange horn goes very high, I cut my tweeters at 10 khz, and even could do without them, but they do help to the whole repoduction effects we are talking about. At this high crossing point I can turn one or two off with no big damage to the whole image.

Time alignment is one of the most important tools of a high resolution sound system, crossing tweeters this high up, forces one to have a very precise time alignment, since the wave lenghts at higher frequencies are smaller, and remember a 1/4 of a wave lenght is noticieable in the response of a system. But also crossing so high gets the xover out of our most delicate listening range.

So on one side, the time alignment of a driver at higher frequencies is more difficult, but it is also less critical.

Now this does not mean, one can lazy out and not align the tweeter properly, but this crossing is not so vital and important since it is so high up.

Crossing to a tweeter at 3 or 5 khz must be a PITA.

My compresson driver starts at around 600 hz, the wave lenght at this frequency is now larger, so micro aligment is less critical, one can do steps of 1/16th of an inch in order to align while that adjsutment at 10 khz would be too much.

I guess a lot depends on the topology of your system.

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