Sub woofers

[pegwill]

Hi

I was just wondering if anybody had just used the panels for the mids and hi rather than the built in bass unit and just used a subwoofer for the bass. I only have one subwoofer.but I wondered what the effect would be to not use the built in woofer and a subwoofer on each channel for the bass, on my Aeons this would be easy to do as they have the facility for biwiring - just a thought

Regards

 

[twich54]

not a good idea IMO, your Aeons are a full range speaker and while I'm not sure of the crossover freq to the bass drivers I assure you it is in a region well above the ideal range for your 'sub'. Remember this, a subwoofer is just that, where it is expected to augment no more than the lower two octaves.

 

[roberto]

Hola pegwill,

Your Aeons, the stat panel/woofer crossover is at circa 450 Hz. Which subwoofer gets to this frequency? Also, the engineers of ML dad spent a lot of time on paper and drawings/error and trial, and hours of listening for the final product.

Because of the room boundaries, the low frequency at our listening position could be a cancellation of certain frequencies. if you feel that your bass energy is not enough, you could help this with a sub.

The very low music bass notes, your Aeon is limited. But what a great speakers are!

Happy listening!

 

[pegwill]

Yep, excellent speakers, I have recapped them and changed the resistors for 1% tolerance which I believe has balanced them out better than the 5% tolerance as fitted, may only be marginal but I thought it made a difference. I appreciate exactly what you are saying about the frequency range of the subwoofer, mines a dynamo 500 so highest range is 200hz so obviously won’t do. But it has set me thinking that I have another’s set of high end speakers in storage that do have a great mid range sound, just trying to remember the name, but escapes me at present. They are much bigger cabinets so might give a better, sound than the Aeon built in woofer. For ever experimenting to get the best sound I can at minimum cost. You know how it is. Probably will be about 12 months before I can try as moving house as well. Just on the list to do while everything is in storage or being moved. Anyway once I get round to it I will let you know the results.
Regards

 

[roberto]

I suggest to you to listen a 440 Hz tone. This will give you and idea of the crossover point of the Aeons. Also, will tell the important role that a good woofer has on them. I do believe that the Aeon's woofer is a fantastic device too. Believe when I say that the ML engineers had chosen a great product to work along your Aeons. The sensitivity of the woofer is a big achievement to match the stat panel sensitivity too. Try to use the same. It is a part of their design.

If you are seeking for better quality deeper bass, change the sub, not the woofer of them. You can find good ML subs in very fair price used. The Depth I model is one of my favourites. You could find one in the $1000.00 price or perhaps a little bit less. This sub, has one of the lowest distortion with three woofers of 8" and it uses an advanced triple servo control. You can't go wrong with this model.

Can you tell from where did you change those resistors? At the crossover?

Happy listening!

 

[pegwill]

Hi

I think you were asking where did I get the resistors from. They were purchased from Hifi Collective in the Uk. I used Jantzen 10W Superes resistors. Although only rated at 10w instead of the original 20w on the advice of Hifi Collective they said 10w would be ok, and they seem to be. I removed the existing resistors from the circuit but left them in place screwed to the board. I then zip tied the new resitors over the top of each existing resistor and soldered them into the circuit. This way it is easy to return to the original configuration if you don’t think it’s better. To my mind it is better and of course because of the tighter tolerance more balanced, anyway it seems to work for me. I replaced all the wirewound resistors involved in the crossover , 5 or 6 for each speaker, I can’t quite remember now. The original ones were Ohmotite with I think a 20% tolerance.
Hope this helps.
Regards

 

[roberto]

Pegwill, with much respect, I do not believe that ML has on your Aeons a 20% value tolerance on those resistors. If that is the case, you did great changing them for a value of 1% in tolerance. I also recommend to you to measure the the old ones to see if they are out of their ohms value. Keep in mind that you are using the half of the power dissipation that ML did use on the crossover design. Also, measure the 10 watts resistors value to check if they had not change their ohms value with the usage. If you want to have the same resistor dissipation value, put together two 10 Watt at the double ohms of the needed value in parallel connection. You will get a 20 Watt resistor.

Happy listening!

 

[JonFo]

As noted, you still need the bass driver in the Aeon to handle the mid-bass range well into the 400Hz range. But, you can improve the results if you relieve it of the load (and distortions they cause) by crossing them over at 80hz using a high-pass filter ahead of the amp. Use a low-pass filter also set at 80Hz to feed the sub.

In modern preamps, you just set the mains to 'small', crossover to 80 and tell it you have a sub.

 

[pegwill]

Hi JonFo
My system is a tube preamp and a tube power amp. So I guess my question is can I do this at the speaker end with an additional crossovers? Or between the pre and power amp with just a filter. I’m not keen to introduce active filtering as from what I can see this adds op amps
Many thanks for you help so far

Regards

Bill

 

[JonFo]

Ah, well in that case, then the best you can do is place a passive high-pass crossover set for 80Hz or so on the input to the Aeon woofer. So Bi-wire the speaker, and place one of these on the line feeding the woofer: https://www.parts-express.com/80-hz-high-pass-8-ohm-crossover--266-458

Remember that this will likely mess with the phase of the woofer relative to the panel, so polarity might (keyword might) need to be inverted on the woofer connection. Use measurements to confirm.

Then the sub is configured to cross over around 80Hz or so as well and adjust the phase controls to match them.

 

[pegwill]

Hi JonFo

Thanks for this when I get them back out of storage I will be trying this.

Regards

Bill

 

[Tosh]

I’m not keen to introduce active filtering as from what I can see this adds op amps

Yes, active xo is done with op amps. But you can still use the passive high pass xo to the panels and avoid op amps there, while using an active op amp-based xo on only the bass (requiring another amp and bypassing the stock passive bass low pass section of the xo).

 

[pegwill]

The idea here is to to filter the below 80hz away from the main speakers to the Sub-woofer. In this way it is said to clean up the load on the amplifier as well as the load on the panel and exiting mid range/woofer.

After a lot of digging around I have come across what I believe to be a very cost effective solution. However I have not been able to try it yet as I am in the process of moving house and probably won’t get the chance for 6-9 months. The article I found can be seen here

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/High-Pass-Filter.htm

Troelgraveson makes high quality speaker systems (although I have not heard any personally) but this is exactly what I was looking for. Keeping it analogue all the way through. Easy just placing two capacitors in the circuit, which I plan to do inside my preamp.

Hope this helps

Regards

 

[Brad225]

Hi pegwill

This appears to be the same idea that Vandersteen uses in their subwoofers. When I owned mine they used Audioquest Sky- Hi Pass Filters to lower the signal to your power amps. Then the circuits in the 2W or 2Q subs would reconstruct the signal and send it to the internal amps.