gigantic

wait til you see what his kid did with them...🤣

They’re made with 4” Owens Corning 703 fiberglass board with an open back and covered in printed burlap. They work well from 3000 Hz to 55Hz

my room. listening area is small, but the room itself is moderate in size

I’ve only seen them with 1/4” and RCA connections. It may be possible that the 1/4” were balanced TRS, but I’m skeptical of that.

My setup, apart from the active crossover, is pretty simple. Sources, a Schiit Bifrost DAC for the digital ones, phono and preamp for analog, a Schiit Freya preamp, balanced output to the FIR DSP408; 4 class D mono blocks and an el84 valve amp to my horns. I use PEQ for crossover filters and to tame resonances for a frequency response that’s +/-3db from 23Hz to 20kHz, but other than that, I don’t use tone controls or dynamic range expanders. I’ve considered putting in a BBE sonic exciter into the chain, but I’m moving towards all balanced connections, I’d rather not introduce any additional noise and ultimately, I haven’t found the need for it.

I simply haven’t found the need to use it. I would likely be more inclined to replace the offending component than mask it with a noise gate.

It's been my experience working as a recording engineer and live sound engineer, that noise gates negatively impact the sound and dynamics of a recording or performance, excessively attenuating the high end decay in the signal. They're were always something that we didn't use unless we really needed to cut noise present in the signal or inhibit feedback. I've not fount the need for it in my home system.

It's a private label unit, made by an undisclosed manufacturer. I've seen the FIR also offered from an Italian brand. the FIR DSP has a lot of features, noise gating, limiting, compression... none of which are needed for our purposes, but in a pro setting could be valuable. generating the FIR files is done with a program called RePhase. I have yet to cross that bridge with mine, I've been using it with IIR filters per Chris Askew's "zeroth order" guidelines. I will hopefully do my final measurements this weekend, after which I may start learning RePhase if I haven't gotten the phase response where I want it. to my ears, it's pretty incredible, but we'll see what the measurements say.

That software UI is identical to the Thomann T.Racks FIR DSP-408 that I've been using for about 4 months. Looking a the link, it seems to be the same as the T.Racks DSP-408 with is the next step down in price. I'm enamored with the FIR version, even if I'm not using the FIR filter capacity of it. I've been using it with Chris Askew's Zeroth Order PEQ filter crossover scheme and it's been nothing short of amazing. The only gripe with my unit is that it comes with a non-thermocoupled cooling fan- it's always on. I ultimately removed the fan- it doesn't get hot in casual home use. the interface is easy to use and intuitive. I wish they had a Mac version, but I just boot one laptop into windows to change the settings and use another to run REW sweeps.

I live in this: while I unfortunately have to drive to work, everything else I need, groceries, produce, meat & seafood, delis and 5 James Beard Foundation award winning restaurants and plenty more that are just as good, including 11 microbreweries, 7 distilleries, music venues and countless gastropubs, coffee shops, taquerias, pizzerias are within walking distance from my home. I park my car on Friday evenings and don’t touch it until I leave for work on Monday morning. I’m 3 blocks from the subway/el station, which puts the rest of the region at my fingertips, without a car and my maker space, where I build guitars, furniture and speakers, is five blocks away. We have numerous small parks and green spaces nearby and in a 25 minute bike ride, I can be lost in the woods of the nation’s largest urban park. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, it’s nice to visit, but I wouldn’t trade city life for anything.

for me, daytime traffic, the sound of the El 3 blocks away, kids playing in the streets and homies idling on the corner with their chucheros blaring can raise the noise floor significantly. luckily, my condo is recently built with spray foam insulation and argon insulated, double paned windows, which cuts down the sound considerably. it was a lot louder when i lived in a 125 year-old row house.

my ambient noise at the moment is 36dB, but when I want to measure my speakers in the late morning & afternoon, it can get up to 45dB; such is life in the inner city.

i get no his from my 4 Fosi ZA3 mono blocks and EL84 valve amp and 3-way horns. I'm also using a Thomann T. Racks DSP FIR 408 active crossover and a Schiit Freya + pre. I had been getting a slight amount of hiss with my Alesis RA150 mono blocks and Schiit Rekkr amps that I'd used previously.

Since my last update, I've added another pair of the ZA3 mono blocks and put Sparkos op amps in all four of them. The sound is magnificent!

Is anything being done to deliver a quasi-linear phase response? if so, is that being done via PEQ or via FIR filters? I think the world is in for a treat when these are released, active crossovers and 2" mid drivers are game changers.