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Line array speaker sensitivity and crossover help. (1 Viewer)

So Im jumping from car audio into home audio and things are incredibly more complicated. Ive read a lot and feel like I have a fairly decent grasp on the concepts.

I want to build my own speakers and need a little help. I would like to build two floor standing speakers about 4 or 5 feet high. I was thinking something like one 10" woofer, four 4" midranges, and two tweeters, maybe ribbons. The receiver and amplifier arent yet decided so that doesnt really affect the speaker choice right now. My question is that Ive heard that it would be ideal to find speakers that are within 1 db sensitivity to eachother to reduce crossover complexity. Is this true?

Next question, How exactly do I wire these speakers and calculate resistance? How does that affect what to look for in a receiver/amp? And what crossovers should I get and how do I wire them into the system?

Finally, What speakers would you recommend? Ive been looking at eminence, tang band, and peerless mainly. Budget for speakers alone is about $500.

I understand these might be fairly simple questions and might be easily answered if I had everything in front of me, but I like to know exactly what Im doing before jumping into anything.

Thanks for any suggestions
 

Brett DiMichele

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I think you are getting in WAY over your head here.

A Line Array is going to be THE most complicated DIY that you can do, you have to not only contend with baffle step compensation and all of the issues you would deal with on a more traditional build, but you will also now have to contend with Comb Filtering between the drivers and will wind up with peaks and valleys in the FR. I am not just shooting from the hip as I have a pair of Line Array's in the other room that I still have yet to assemble and the speaker design was done by a guy with WAY more brains than me and he had the right equipment to do the testing, and even with that said, there are still issues if using passive networks.

Have deep pockets and plan on going with fully active crossovers where you can taylor the time delays and FR plots.


Welcome aboard! And sorry if I sound discouraging but I think you'd be better off going with a well established "DIY kit"

Here is some info on wiring speakers:
http://www.colomar.com/Shavano/speaker.html

Here are some photos of my Array Baffles:

http://s267.photobucket.com/albums/ii305/brett248vista/Line%20Array/
 

JohnRice

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You definitely are biting off too much. One fundamental problem is that you don't use dual tweeters, unless you are doing a dipole or bipole design, with one of the tweeters on the rear of the speaker cabinet. Your question is not remotely simple. Crossover design can be incredibly complex.
 

Brett DiMichele

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Right on John.... And Line Arrays are simply too complex for passive networks. My pair was originally to be passive, and John Janowitz did all of the testing on the beta pair and got the FR bumps "mostly" smoothed out but it was never ruler flat with passive networks. They need custom made active networks or a pro sound type of active network to get them where they need to be.


This isn't a project where you order a bunch of speakers and hope it works. Sure I'd say do it if we were talking a blowout of cheap drivers from PE and no more than $200 in the project just to "tinker" but to do a a pair of giant killers, even with modest drivers like mine, you are looking at 2-3K in materials alone.
 

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