Digital Crossovers for Shearwater Hot Rods?

prime minister

Site Owner
Staff member
Hi @Pat McGinty .
Your musings in the other threads have got me thinking (Always a dangerous thing!). Would there be any benefit, and how would I go about doing so, if I wanted to switch my beloved Shearwater Hot Rods to digital crossovers? Now, I do love these things so much, that I won't change anything in them. However, following your lead with the new direction that Meadowlark is going in, doesn't seem THAT sacrilegious!

Any thoughts?
 
That’s a pairbof speakers with passive XO right? So you wanna gut it out and replace it with some active digital XO?

Active XO is fun btw!
 
Sacrilege? Ha! No. I live in a myth and dogma free zone.

You sure could cheat the existing filters and run four channels of amp into the existing binding posts. I've attached the schem. As you can see a simple, say, clip lead jumper would defeat the low pass, but on the high pass you'd want to both jumper the cap and lift the resonance shunt that's parallel to the load (Shearwater used a nonferrofluid tweeter with a high Q resonance - so we knocked that down with that shunt to stop the thing banging itself to death). It would be easy to reverse after you've been horrified by the change.

And, yes, DSP is a real kick in the pants to fool around with.

Shearwater.jpg
 
So, what should I use for crossover duty? Is there any possibility I could make things better, or just different?
Thanks, Pat.
Erik
 
Hi Erik -

Hmmm...good question. I did retrofit a pair of old, crappy Def Techs a while back (under duress) and they were transformed from pitifully shitty to reasonably passable. Cheap drivers, all, plus bad filter design and execution.

But Shearwater's filter is minimal, the parts are great and the design and execution were pretty much maxed out.

So I dunno. The change would certainly make things different. But, better? I'd actually have to do the experiment and see. If I had a pair of Shearwaters, I'd try it just for giggles. The PEQ might force the decision.

You'll be left out of one of DSP's big advantages - the ability to shrink the enclosure. Here's a current custom design that is exactly what today's rendition of the Shearwater "idea" would look like. An excellent parts quality two way that does wonderful bass that can now fit into a small box. 7.5" Satori woofer as in Kite. But the customer specified the new Satori Beryllium dome, ferrite magnet tweeters. Frankly, I was not expecting very much from a dome, having lavished AMTs on my work for the past few years - but boy was I wrong! Drop dead gorgeous trebles. Just beautiful. I'm actually having trouble shipping these.

If I were inclined to build a passive speaker - and I am not - this driver set in a floorstander would be it.

Oops, sorry for the digression, 'couldn't help it.
front-and-left-side.jpg front-and-back.jpg DSCN0855.JPG
 
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