Went Active: Wow!

[Soundmig]

So, I've had this nice Bryston 10B-LR sitting around for several years (17 to be exact) and have not really used it much. I sent it to Bryston in 2012 (before warranty ran out) and they went through it and brought it up to 2012 standards "free of charge" (gotta love Bryston!).
Anyway, I like to build my own speakers and my current iteration uses an OB 12" GRS driver (Great OB driver btw) (40Hz to 151Hz active x-over with DSP), a periodically loaded vifa/peerless 4" mid-bass driver (151hz to 2.8K) and HiVi dome tweeter from 2.8K to a bit past 20K. X-over between 4" and tweet is passive 12db/oct (electrical) and about 18dB/oct acoustical. Since I recently bought a small third amp (for tweeters), a Parasound Zamp V3, I decided it was time to go active, and I put the Bryston in for the x-over vs. using passive coils and caps on the 4" /tweet combo. The cards that I have for the 10B-LR are 800 Hz and another set at 2021Hz. Since the Fs for the tweeter is 1000Hz, I surmised that the 2021Hz x-over at 24dB/oct would be safe. (The HIVi tweeter is very smooth from about 1800 to 20K). The "time" differential between the Vifa 4" and the tweeter is 25mm, so my tweeter is recessed by 25mm relative to the 4" mid-bass.
Quick Aside: before doing the active crossover implementation, I tried the Z-amp in place of my beloved MC modified Hafler amp to drive the 4"/tweet combo .... boy was I surprised. I was skeptical of the rave reviews on this little 45 watt/ch amp, but man is it good. As natural and sweet sounding as the Hafler but without the mosfet haze (slightly better detail and definition/nuance) - call me shocked, but this little amp delivers!
Anyway, to hook this all up I had to build a cable that would connect my Freya pre to drive the inputs of both the Bryson X-over (driving amps that feed the 4" and the tweeter) and the DSP xover/controller that I use to drive the 12" (down to 40Hz) and both subs (below 40 Hz). For that I used silver clad copper Switchcraft XLR's (2 Females to 4 Males - Y configuration) and DH Lab pure silver 23g solid core IC cable soldered up using TRT Wonder Solder. Love that DH lab solid core silver cable
So I now have the system set-up so that all of the actual x-overs are active. There are some passive components as there is baffle step compensation on the 4" mid-bass and very large Audyn Q4 capacitors keeping low frequency energy out of the 4". There is also a 10uF Film cap in series with the tweeter to protect from any turn-on/off LF bumps.
It took a bit of work to get the driver levels and integration to "lock-in" but now that has been achieved (with tons of cables going everywhere) I am well pleased by how much better the active x-over sounds. The soundstage (which was already very very good) is deeper and the subtle timbre cues on things like Bassoon, Bass Trombone, snare drum, saxophone, etc. are more evident and more "relaxed" or natural sounding. I was fearful that adding another piece of electronics between the pre and amps would introduce glare or other unwanted artifacts, but the Bryston is very transparent and the "addition" of it to the circuits is not at all "evident". I guess that I should have known that such a beast from Bryston would be "transparent", but I'm always concerned when adding "even more" pieces to the signal path.

[Masterlu]

Nice! looking forward to going Active w/ Bryston gear very soon.

[Formerly YB-2]