[Felipe]

Hi,

I am very unexperienced in speaker building, and although it looks much easier than building an AKSA or a GK-1, i have special doubts in the corssover parts :

Say you have the design, with the values of the capacitors , resistors and indutances. What should one look for in these 3 categories ?
What should matter to get the best performance out of them ?

Resistors :
- metal film , carbon ?? does this matter ?
- ??

Capacitors :
- Bipolare ??                      
- MKT ?? MKP ?? KpSn ??Propylene ??

Inductances :
- HQ ? HQP ? Ferroid ??

Can you give some hints on what to look for ?
Do you know any good Europe suppliers on the net ?

Thanks
Felipe

[SamL]

Hi Felipe,

Not sure about the supplier in Europe, the company below are popular among DIY in US.

http://www.madisound.com/catalog.html
Madisound carry a wide rang of crossover component from cheap to expensive.
http://www.madisound.com/cgi-bin/discuss.cgi
Madisound speaker building form is worth visiting and post your question.

http://www.soniccraft.com/
Sonic craft carry high quality crossover components with reasonable afforable price.

Axon caps and resistors are good value. Even if you are building a provent kit, start with OK parts speacially on the tweeter as you may need to twick the value to suit your taste and room. As for inductor, make sure you get the inductor with the correct dcr (ohm) value that stated by the kit as different value affect the crossover slop.


Have fun,
Sam

[AKSA]

Felipe,

I can't really say much here.

However, here's my 2c.

You can use 1W and 2W metal film resistors for shunt duties, and up to 10W wire wound (inductive style is fine since a voice coil is very inductive anyway) for series applications.

Bipolar electros are fine in shunt modes, but at the least polyester caps should be used for series applications, such as driving tweeters.  The best is the foil polypropylenes, and the exotica like Hovlands are marginally better again.

Can't answer for sources in Europe.  Britain - Cricklewoods and Maplins - have all this stuff but are expensive.  France has the excellent metallized polypropylene caps from SCR in Chateroux, well priced too.  Holland might be worth a good look as well.  I'm told the Ansar from UK is a very good capacitor for crossovers.

Cheers,

Hugh