So you're a day behind. Big deal. Ultimately you can rest easy because you know you took the time to get things where you want them to be; if it was for a customer one can be tempted to take shortcuts here and there.
Once again you are completely right. So today I took my sweet time about getting started. My back was a bit sore anyway from lifting these things up and down from the sawhorses etc. My son had the day off and came over midday to pal around and help, which made it even more fun. And easier on the back.
Anyway, we finished the second speaker, paused to eat lunch, and then sat down to listen. When I woke up this morning Rory Galagher's first album was running through my head and I took that as a sign that we should play that cd. To be honest I really didn't expect any major differences in sound. I had hoped for some crisper bass, and expected the mid to brighten up a bit because of the poly caps.
I sure didn't expect a serious difference in the high end because the tweeters had some kind of poly cap to begin with. But surprise surprise the tweeters FR has increased considerably, enough that they are overshadowing/overpowering any other changes. Bass has tightened up some but I'm not getting a clear picture of where that is because the high end needs to be padded down.
I'm not upset or dissapointed with these results in any way. I made a serious change in the system and fully expected that some adjustments will need to be made, I just expected that the mid would be the place where I had to start. But this is exactly why I wanted to get the crossovers external and divide the sections up. Once I get a handle on things it will be easy to add some padding where needed.
Which brings me back to Monday. I have been procrastinating terribly concerning running REW and doing some measured sound checks, and finally sat down Monday before starting the first speaker to deal with that. And couldn't get a squeek out of the program. I sat for 2 hours and fought with it before just giving up and starting with the box work. ANd this morning I finally figured out what I had done wrong. A seriously rookie dumb mistake. I had plugged the patch cable from my laptop into the Aux input on the amp, and, wait for it, yes, into the mic input on the laptop. So the moral of this story is that 2 inputs don't make an output. Pissed me right off for being so stupid, but at least I know now what to do tomorrow morning.
A couple of other points, the one pic shows the rubber isolation pads that I cut to place under each crossover board, and the last pic shows how the leads were connected to the binding bosts, soldered into a ring lug and screwed down rather than the push on spade lug that I used before.
So at this point I have some tuning to do and then will have reached every initial goal that I wanted when I started out with this project 1 1/2 years ago. Except that now I've pretty much decided to buy the new Wavecor mids that I talked about earlier, am seriously thinking that it's time to make the mid crossover a bandpass rather than let it run full range on the upper end, and want to learn more about Linkwitz-Reilly 4th order slopes.
It never really stops does it?
Cheers,
James
