Capacitors

[dvenardos]

What brand capacitors do you use in the crossovers for the ARX speakers?

Thanks,
Don

[tesseract]

What brand capacitors do you use in the crossovers for the ARX speakers?

Thanks,
Don

Yes, I would be interested in knowing this, too.

[Chane M&C]

We use the top two grades of polypropylene caps from what I believe is the largest OEM supplier in Asia.

[tesseract]

Thanks, Jon. Would you be able to tell us, where does the planar start to take over from the woofer?

[Chane M&C]

Thanks, Jon. Would you be able to tell us, where does the planar start to take over from the woofer?

In all model's cases, right about 2200Hz, 4th order.

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PS: Crossover points and rates of attenuation are more or less dictated by the combination(s) of raw driver responses, and can't easily be shoehorned into textbook configurations. I add this because sometimes we all assume crossover points and types can be placed arbitrarily and/or selected from a list.

You actually have to select the drivers' raw responses with a sense of what kind of system you want to make, at least if you're going to build a simple, elegant design and not need a dozen or more parts to force any two random drivers into two complimenting, standard responses.

Arx crossovers are simple, average only 6 parts, and the points are set by the drivers - they fit well where they are and we have added flexibility in tuning treble tilt and midrange damping. The rates are selected to approximate a classic tuning with reasonable power control too.

We spend quite a bit of time in trial crossover design, but we finally ended up at about halfway between 2kHz and 2.5kHz - typical 25mm tweeter points. The first part of the slopes are also overdamped a touch for good dynamic control (especially when a $300 or $500 speaker is driven hard by a $300 or $500 AVR). You can lean on these designs a bit and not have them get shattered sounding.

This comment came in this morning:

The planer magnetic tweeters are very smooth but extended,and most importantly integrated, in Jons application they sound like a good 25mm softdome with non grating extension not extension with the drawback of most metal domes. The Arx is a very neutral speaker with a very clean and fast sound without being fatiguing or overly warm...

I think the non-fatiguing part speaks to the filter design choices.