[Gianluca]

I just got an idea...

What if I built a 5 ways speaker system?

1" tweeter;
3" midrange;
6" midrange;
8" woofer;
12"(sub)woofer.

each of the drivers would be timbre matching and all of them in a different box, with external Xovers.

Would this configuration have any results?

This is not a joke... I'd like to hear some opinions from the experienced DIYers.

Thanks.

[TimForman]

Yeah, come you guys. Give us the crossover design!

[Anthony_Gomez]

2 ways are challenging
3 ways aren't for the faint of heart.
4 ways...have only seen done successfully by some VERY experienced people ...rarely.
5 ways ....ummm...no thank you!!!

:-D

[Allen Ross]

what about active crossing?

[ThomasW]

Quote:

This is not a joke... I'd like to hear some opinions from the experienced DIYers.

Well this VERY experienced builder suggests using the fewest number of drivers and XO points for the best performance.

A good two way combined with a sub offers the best performance IMHO.......

[JesseSilver]

I'm not an expert, by any means, but I know what sounds good to me. My speakers are a pair of Dunlavy SM-1's and a McCormack amp. Those speakers (which are just tweeters and 6" mids) are only off -1.5db at 60Hz. Many other brands and DIY speakers are capable of similar performance, so I'm not quite sure what you'd gain by adding more and more drivers other than coloration from the crossover points. Sure, you might get better dynamics, but how loud do we all listen anyway?! Personally, I LOVE my speakers and once I finish my AV15 subwoofer to fill in the area below 55, I think I'll be one happy clam

Like I said, I'm not an expert... that's just my opinion. Less is almost always more.

[RichardHOS]

IMO, there's two ways to go in pursuing the "ultimate" speaker. One is to keep crossover points out of the mid-treble region where vocals and critical instruments are voiced, from roughly 300Hz to 3000Hz. That would result in a three way speaker (four if you need or count a dedicated sub for the bottom octave or so). The other approach is to use all active crossovers, and from the beginning concede that there will be crossovers in that critical region. Once you have one crossover point there, you might as well have several. Using active crossovers with steep slopes, you can confine the used bandwidth of a particular driver to a small portion of its linear range; the narrow used bandwidth and steep slope should give well behaved phase response. This could result in a five way, six way, or even more complex design. With phase problems out of the way, crossover design would actually be simpler than the typical three-way. Physical mounting of the drivers to avoid comb filtering artifacts is probably the biggest hurdle, and perhaps why I haven't seen any serious attempts at this design. It would seem to be well suited to a semi-line array type of speaker, with frequency tapering instead of power tapering. I think it's been done crudely, but I've never seen a full-out attempt at it.

[Hank Frankenberg]

What if I built a 5 ways speaker system?

What if you wanted clean, accurate sound instead?

Heed ThomasW's advice. He is spot on. You could spend a year learning how to design an excellent passive crossover for two-ways and maybe three-ways, but beyond that, uh-uh.
I'm not joking either - just trying to save you time and frustration.

[Bill Fagal]

Let me first say that I'm a proponent of full/wide-range drivers with a minimum of XO points. However, I can respect the potential benefits of multi-banding.

My thinking on this matter is similar to Richard's, with the addition that I would suggest digital crossovers for an all-out attempt to preserve phase relationships through steep XO points.

The other option no one has mentioned yet is multiple wide-range drivers crossed over fist-order. If you choose drivers with, say, six good octaves of bandwidth (and controlled out-of-band behavior) and limit each driver to its 2 middle octaves (or less) with 1st-order crossovers, you might end up with something nice, though you'd have to pay attention to lobing. Driver selection would be critical here, and suitable drivers may not be available.

Bill

[John E Janowitz]

The problem with a type of system like this is getting everything phase matched properly. In a two way system you design for flat response, then tweak component values until your phase is coherent. In a 2 way you can play with all the values in the mid and tweeter xover to get your phase correct. Changing each component value will shift your phase one way or another. So if you do a 3rd order on mid and tweeter, you have 6 components you can play with to adjust the phase.

In a 3 way or system with even more drivers, this becomes difficult. Say you get your xover phase set well between the woofer and mid. Now you move on to the tweeter. The only thing you can adjust easily without messing up the woofer/mid phase are the tweeter values. If you adjust something in the mid xover, it is possible to throw off the phase for the mid/woofer xover. So you only have 3 components in the tweeter section to play with to adjust the phase instead of 6 like in a 2 way.

This is the challenge I see with more drivers in a system. If you have drivers with a very flat response, and go through and do impedance compensation before you start the xover design it does become easier though. If everything had a flat impedance and flat response to begin with, Xover design would be simple.

John

[Jack Gilvey]

Quote:

each of the drivers would be timbre matching and all of them in a different box, with external Xovers

How would you timbre-match the (sub)woofer and the tweeter?

[Anthony_Gomez]