The Center Assembly

 

Happy to announced that the center channel has been put together!! The four drivers and plate amp have been wired in and assembled into the cabinet.  Drilling was made a lot easier by pre-existing pilot holes from the cabinet maker which was a super nice touch.  Also they went to the trouble of insetting the plate amp giving the rear a very clean and professional look.

Sadly, this speaker still can't make any sound.  Over the next week I'll use the Hypex software to enable each channel in turn and begin the process of building up the Virtual Point Source crossover. 

I don't know why but those who haven't done this part think it's easy or requires no finesse and careful adjustment.  Nothing is further from the truth.  What is easy is we no longer have to fiddle around with individual crossover parts.  No more resistor, capacitor swapping and tinkering here! 

The worst case scenario  I've seen is builders who take the published specifications at face value, throw in some guessed at curves, and then use global EQ to "fix" the speaker. To be clear, you can't achieve anything good that way. Perhaps with horn speakers that are designed for simple crossovers which have long been understood by the users this can yield good results but to achieve the virtual point source effect we are going for here each driver must be individually measured for frequency, phase and delay so the electronic curves are complementary to each driver and work with the driver physics, not against them.  One key ingredient to this is an excellent midrange that can play beyond it's crossover points.