Here we go again.
Just look at that crossover! A passive crossover at 100 Hz. Then look at cheap electrolytic caps back to back. Then take a look at that miserable iron cored choke in series with the bass drivers. Now add that amateurish construction and the mess is complete.
If I had a crossover that looked and was thrown together like that in one of my speakers, I would hang my head in shame.
Now they will run into the same problems I ran into years ago. That is just no way to conceive a speaker. You just can't get a defined bass doing that, and I abandoned it quickly. You can see the bass problems in the frequency response graphs.
The next problem is that I doubt the Fs of those drivers is 20 Hz. the null between the tuning peaks. So that is what is known as a very extended bass alignment to play the specs game. The problem is it produces a horrible sloppy bass. I have auditioned quite a few speakers like that recently, and its not pretty.
With the lower drivers operating below 100 Hz, it really is a two way with a sub. However a passive crossover has no business driving a sub!
I would not dream of donating that outfit nearly 10K!
No offense TLS Guy but some of your comments about loudspeakers on this forum often go unchecked as you are a self proclaimed expert. There are several others here similar to you, but I usually keep quite until the BS runs too deep.
The electrolytics are bypassed with polys if you read closer in the review. Its not evident in the photo. Good like finding a 200uF poly cap that is of reasonable size and cost that can fit in the crossover. Bypassing electrolytics is a great compromise to this problem as most manufacturers tend to do. They placed two 400uF 100V caps in series which halves the total capacitance, but doubles the working voltage to accommodate high power amps without blowing up. The bypass cap is a very high end Solen which again isn't clear in the photo.
The choke on the woofer is a 6 mH low DCR and has a power rating of 500 Watts with low saturation so again you simply apply a absolute that all iron cores must be bad. For midrange drivers and tweeters I tend to agree but using them for bass drivers where the values often get large are an understandble application. A choke this value in an air core would be much larger and have more resistive losses thus you would lose damping which is critical for the bass frequencies. So if the steel core isn't distorting or saturating, then why change it to something costlier, larger and potentially less performing?
BTW, you fail to mention the crossover is point to point soldered and not slapped onto a PC board. Not only is this more labor intensive and costly but its better from a performance standpoint.
Every listening session I have heard on these speakers is far from sloppy bass. Of course your ideal speaker appears to be a B&W Nautilus or some DIY line array where every driver has its own crossover. There is no accounting for taste and that is your perogative if that is what floats your boat. But to say that these speakers are a crappy design is very ignorant and in your case arrogant b/c to an unfamiliar reader, it sounds like you are correct.
Every designer has choices to make when building products which include trade offs in size, budget, etc. That is part of the art and what differentiates between a stellar product and a mediocre one.
The 100Hz crossover is a very shallow slope and the mids play down low in frequency which gives that very tight perception of bass that David and myself have noticed. Wilson does very similar things in their speakers as well for example. This works great if your mids can handle it which in this case their drivers can.
My T30-LSE towers for example utilize no passive crossover at all in the bass drivers and this is from the same company. It all depends on the product design and how well the system plays as a whole. Every design is different and you have to do what is right for that particular application.
Hmm maybe in the future we should bypass the whole review process and just send you pictures of the product with specs so we can get your expert opinion on how the speaker sounds
Come to think of it, maybe I should do that myself and save the back strain.
