Newbie success in Speak CrossOver Modifications!

Tweakers' Asylum

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I've left speak modifications to the very last of my tweaking journey and got very good results by adding roughly 1% capacitance to the HF signal path capacitors. (Both the high pass cap and also the second cap leading to the tweeter)
I have a two way B&W bookshelf speaker. I find the HF lacking details after listening to a B&W 3-way at my friend's place.
After this mod, delicate details and more air came out but still keeps most of the details remained untouched (so that you still need to crank up the volume for the decay and the weight of the music is preserved, as opposed to overdoing it, which will cause the HF to overshadow everything), the bass is firmer and each bass note is more definite(perhaps due to clarifying effects to the HF part of the of start of every note).
I've learnt not to deviate from the cross over point too much (eg, 8-9% or 2 semi-tones, or roughly 200 Hz) is way too much. 1%-ish seems OK. The last cap (after highpass and low cut) controls the strength of the HF, having too much exaggerates the echoes, decay, holigraphic-ness and speed of the attack. Overdoing leads to the feeling that echoes rather than music dominate it. In my case 11% extra capactance to the 2nd cap had lead to that. Between 1 and 11% may be there's some middle ground. So far I'll start with 1%, which is not bad at all.
I also used very small value caps as bypass and they help a lot. As an aside this seems to confirm that there's sinificance in things happening above 20,000 Hz !

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The Cable Cooker

Topic - Newbie success in Speak CrossOver Modifications! - E 15:27:03 01/04/03 (0)

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