Your unit appears to be operating correctly. I'm not sure why you're disappointed in the results. The results are pretty much what you'd expect with this sort of circuit/board design and power supply type and physical location.I am going to forward this to Mr. Marchand, who is an engineer himself. Would like to hear his input.
This unit was probably state of the art 20-30 years ago. In those days active xover design was not as sophisticated as today. Just an active two or three way system, often 12 dB/octave Butterworth, as an alternative for a passive three way system. With passive filters, which where also a lot less complicated as today is common in good quality speakers. Parts quality was much less, often cheap capacitors and sometimes even ferrite core coils! .
Yes, that's exactly correct. The XM-44 is one of their more recent units and a bit more evolved than the earlier crossovers that were state-variable based topologies. But still, extremely limited in capability relative to the DSP-based units now on the market.
EV XOs by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
I used a active XO on my KEF Altecs transmission line cabinets and it was sooperb. I say put your foot in the water and give it a whirl. It's like bass and treble control on steroids.Interesting -- thanks for measuring & posting this!
It might (?!?) be interesting to compare a 'high end' analog XO like this to a decidedly lower-budget (indeed, borderline vintage) XO like the venerable ones made & sold for years (for the pro market) by EV. I doubt they'd do very well -- on the other hand they were inexpensive (and are very inexpensive, and plentiful, used) and they're user configurable (albeit with some 'hands on' work).
I have a 'pair' of one such model (cosmetically/morphologically mismatched but electrically equivalent) that I keep trying to work up the gumption to try on my FrankenAltecs -- although I also keep trying to work up the gumption to try DSP, too.
https://www.electrovoice.com/binary/XEQ-3_Engineering_Data_Sheet.pdf
I truly appreciate your trying to help me, thanks. Knowing my strengths/weaknesses I know it's best in my case to leave crossovers to the engineers who make the speakers and electronics. And as the self appointed representative of the life and social sciences wing of the ASR party I know I speak for others as well, lol.
Yeah, that Behringer 2496
.I had that part in my system for a while. As a crossover and also for room correction. It had a terts band display and you could connect a microphone and generate white or pink noise with it to examine room response and resonances. Worked reasonably well. I bought it for a replacement for my Marchand Xover I already mentioned in a previous post. After a few years I went to + 100dB/W full range horn loaded speakers and a SET 300B and didn't need it anymore. I use this system for 20 years (!) with only a few tube replacements. I finally got what I wanted and lost interest in audio and focused on music instead. Only recently I became interested in audio again because of efficient class d amps and DSP benefits of all kind.
