I want to applaud Mr. Barnes for answering this post and giving us some insight to how his crossover was developed.
I must say though that I personally think he should consider the fact that
MANY well regarded high end speaker companies have produced excellent measuring speakers which were later determined to need some "tweaking" of their crossovers, even though the speakers measured perfectly!
One great example that comes to mind is Dunlavy speakers. They have to be one of the most "over measured" speakers ever produced. Dunlavy measured soooo many parameters that I think they may have had the tightest QC of any large scale high end speaker company. They used much better facilities and measuring tools than Mr. Barnes and most other small high end speaker companies too! Yet with all their measurements, I know quite a few audio industry insiders who purchased Dunlavys and then improved their crossovers! Some other examples of excellent well regarded speakers which have gone through many crossover "tweaks" (by their designers, not the actual customers) are Hales, Wilson, Avalon, Merlin, Pipedream, Thiel, Vandersteen, Von Schweikert and Talon. That's quite a few big nameswhich add up to over 300 years of combined design experience! Yet
ALL OF THESE COMPANY'S DESIGNERS "tweaked" their crossovers through "lessons learned".
Here is my point in a nutshell
an absolutely great speaker is much more than calculations/measurements, great drivers and top flight parts!. (If it was that easy, then a companies like Sony or Pioneer could make great sounding high end speakers by purchasing Scan Speak drivers, do some calculations, verify the final product with calibrated mics then bring those speakers to market and crush the high end with low costs due to economy of scale purchasing/amnufacturing!) IMHO great speakers with true "inner soul" usually occur when the designer goes waaaaaaaay beyond the measurements!
I strongly feel that a competent high end speaker designer should
ALWAYS try various crossover iterations that are beyond the "theoretical" perfect measured design. Calculations and verified response measurements are a very good start, but
ONLY A START! Based on what I know, most great speaker designers find the "true soul" of their designs byspending additional tweak time on their "perfect" measured implementations! It's a damn shame that most designers only do this on subsequent model designs, but I strongly suspect this is due to customer and/or dealer feedback, once their speaker is compared to other high quality competitors and small but noticeable issues are pointed out to the designer.
Hopefully, all of these discussions will motivate Mr. Barnes to compare other crossover circuit implementations (such as Murphy's) to his stock implementation. More importantly I hope he spends additional development time considering other circuit iterations of his crossover and understand how he can find additional soul in his speaker offerings.
