Every designer has a “philosophy” regarding on how to build the best possible loudspeaker. My “philosophy” is “keep it simple” and “less is more”. To me, designing a loudspeaker is like cooking a fancy dinner. Use high quality ingredients in a well thoughtful composed combination, but don’t over do it. Let the fine ingredients speak for them self.
The same thing goes for designing cross-overs. Don’t do it more complicated than necessary to achieve the desired goal. Keep the number of cross-over components to a minimum. If you can use a tweeter in a design without a resistor in series with it — “do it”. It will sound better. It’s not necessary to flatten out every little wrinkle in the frequency response by adding more cross-over components — “it will kill the sound”. Instead look back and see if you have chosen the right driver unit for the design.
Other important factors for a successful design is to achieve an even power response and off-axis dispersion as well as a satisfying distortion behavior for the loudspeaker. If you follow these design rules, you will get rewarded with a wider, higher and deeper sound stage and the “sweet spot” will be bigger and you can play stronger before distortion becomes an issue.
Again, this is my personal opinion and design “philosophy” and I’m aware that every designer has their own personal preferences on how a high quality loudspeaker are built.
Loudspeaker Driver Units:
The choice of driver units for a design is an important factor for a successfully implemented design. Audioexcite will not use the cheapest or “buy-out” driver units available on the market. The drivers chosen here are from the mid to high price range, but that doesn’t rule out for instance a combination of a mid priced tweeter paired with a high priced mid-woofer as long as the performance of the driver is adequate. The driver units here are carefully chosen from a variety of loudspeaker driver manufacturers. I think the “heart” and “soul” of music lives in the mid-range, therefore the drivers chosen for the mid-range reproduction are critical for the end result.
Cross-over Components:
I can say it right away! I’m not a big fan of super expensive cross-over components. In all of the AudioExcite loudspeakers I use cross-over caps and resistors from Mundorf. I have chosen the “Mcap Audiophile” MKP cap as the standard cap in all of the loudspeaker models. This is a high quality cap with a nice price/performance value. It has very neutral character with a specified tolerance of +-3%, but often surpasses that and in real measurements +-1-2% is common.
Mundorf describes the Mcap Audiophile cap as follows:
“The practically induction-free type of construction
and the low loss factor of the MCap® results in a
very „quick“ capacitor.
The MCap® forms the basis for vivid music reproduction
rich in nuance.”
In some designs where it’s justified, the Mcap Supreme is used for the tweeter series section of the cross-over. This cap gives a bit more refinement in the upper frequencies and the higher price tag is motivated by the additional performance improvement.
Mundorf describes the Mcap Supreme cap as follows:
“Its subtle fine gradation of the high tone
range invigorates the entire sound production;
voices and instruments take shape and
become extremely diverse.”
All of the AudioExcite loudspeaker models uses air-core coils as standard. Where the price/performance is motivated, foil coils are used in the mid-range series section of the cross-over. Where very large coils are needed, iron-core coils are used.
Mundorf describes the foil coils as follows:
“With their excellent electrical and mechanical
properties, the foil coils aid in the
reproduction of music, making it clearly more
dynamic and faithful to detail overall.”