[Danny Richie]

Danny, I do not trust my ears to that level of granularity. Having said that I do like what I hear.

But this hobby is all about what we hear. How can you say that you don't trust your ears?

I still say listen both ways. If you don't hear any difference then it doesn't make any difference. Why even waste time speculating the difference? Until you listen you'll never know.

I guess what I'm saying is, I am of the camp that says "If it can't be measured, it can't be heard." I will be the first to admit that my measuring skills ain't great, but I am willing to learn.

There is a lot of very easy to hear differences that can't be easily measured.

[aceinc]

At the end of last weekend, I hooked things up so I could A/B my B&Ws against the Woofer cabinets I built with a pair of KEF 101/2s providing the mid-highs.

While I like the sound of the OB woofer/KEF combination, it was time to see how they compared.

I was disappointed.everything sounded wrong, they sounded muddy, even the bass sounded poor in comparison to the B&Ws. I was pretty bummed out. I played with various integration settings on the bass cabinets and got them to sound a little better, but they couldn't compare to the B&Ws.

So during the week, I worked with a purpose, but a sense of doubt, on the OB mid/tweeter section to go along with the OB woofer section. I only built one because it is completely seat of the pants;

• Pick drivers that looked good to my novice eye.
• Make a cabinet that had as much to do with the wood available as any coherent design.
• Decided on a simple 6 db crossover mainly to protect the tweeter.

I stained but did not polyurethane the cabinets, and got the drivers installed this morning.

With trepidation I hooked it all up using wire nuts to temporarily connect the wires, cap & coil. I disconnected the right input channel to my test power amp and fired it up. I did some test sweeps with REW at about a meter, and it looked OK, a bit of a trough at 600 hz, otherwise it looked OK, so I switched over to my CD player. Played my Sheffield Drum CD, and listened. It sounded rather good. I listened some more and it sounded a bit bright, but it sounded great to me.

So I hooked one B&W up so I could A/B them. Now it was the B&W's turn to compare poorly. The B&W still sounds phenomenal, but the new speaker sounds better. I listened to my various test music A/B-ing them along the way. I am sure the new speaker could be tweaked a bit, perhaps a high pass capacitor at 80-100 hz to reduce the load on the mid woofer. It might be a bit bright, but the REW plot doesn't show that.

So now I am stoked to get the second mid/tweeter cabinet built.

This mid/tweeter cabinet has nothing in it from GR-Research which is why I haven't described what I did in detail. I do not want to step over any lines of decency, since Danny is kind enough to share his time and knowledge here.

[aceinc]

I ordered binding posts, and an L-Pad for each cabinet today. While ordering stuff, I ordered a "calibrated" microphone to do better testing.

I also have the second cabinet assembled, waiting for glue to dry and then I will finish sand & stain it. Hopefully by Thursday I will have the second cabinet ready for testing.

Since schlepping these cabinets to central Texas isn't happening anytime soon, does anyone know someone in the south Florida area that can help with Xover design?