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In Reply to: Nagging question about op amps in active crossovers posted by kurt s on January 24, 2007 at 10:07:20:
Hello Kurt,I truly understand your feeling of a "credibility gap' between what you read about the Orions and what your experience with op amps, OK capacitors, ho-hum amps etc. would dictate. I, too, went through a similar thought process.
First, let me state that the Orions are indeed a stellar performer as you have no doubt read elsewhere. They are anything but lifeless and dimensionless in sound quality. I am not an Orion owner, but rather am a person who spent 3 days in Mr. Linkwitz vacation home auditioning the Orions, and then months later actually auditioned Mr. Linkwitz's personal Orion system in his home in Corte Madera, CA. My second audition was due to my not being entirely convinced that the system in Sea Ranch was performing at the level that others had expressed, and I wanted to resolve the issues I had with its sound.
In my second audition, I found the Orions to be everything that others had praised them for. Admittedly, Mr. Linkwitz's listening room is acoustically superb and ideally suited to his speaker's design, but I'm sure many speakers would perform near their best in his room. That they are able to perform at such a high level with such pedestrian equipment is certainly a tribute to their design and Mr. Linkwitz's ingenuity.
I can only provide a layman's perspective as to why it works so well, but I would submit that: (1) the highly reactive loads that are presented to an amplifier through passive crossovers are far more deleterious to the overall sound than are op amps and OK capacitors, (2) with his active crossover he has been able to compensate and/or correct for some of the deficiencies in the drivers and the overall design, and (3) open baffle design has certain inherent qualities that are most difficult if not impossible to achieve with a boxed loudspeaker. In other words, Mr. Linkwitz has been able to identify the parameters in loudspeaker design that are the most audible and the most critical to optimize, and then executed the design accordingly.
Its not to say that the system might not improve even further with higher quality parts, cables, amplifiers, etc., but as a design he has demonstrated that greater performance results can be achieved through proper speaker design than through higher quality amps, capacitors, wiring, etc., etc. While people have different tastes in music and value different aspects of sound reproduction, I would submit that anyone with any knowledge of music and experience with reproduced sound who was fortunate enough to audition Mr. Linkwitz's personal Orion system would agree that his system is one of the best sounding systems they've ever experienced.
Dean
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Follow Ups
- Re: Nagging question about op amps in active crossovers - Dean L. 17:56:16 01/24/07 (0)
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