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.