Amplifier-centric two-way XO (and system) design

The traditional view is that the speakers are the weakest link of the audio system and hence they're not really designed with amplifiers in mind. Why make amp design easier when speakers are plenty hard enough to get right?

In my experience speakers don't contribute very much to the listening satisfaction. They're more a matter of taste, but a much better speaker can't undo the faults of an amplifier (or DAC for that matter). That's not to say some speakers don't sound better than others - I mostly prefer my Paiyons to the much cheaper Denons but their 'betterness' is orthogonal to the way to the manner DACs and amps sound better. Electronics has had the biggest impact on my listening satisfaction so far so here is an XO designed to make the electronics' job as easy as possible.

Given that the critical parameters of an amp designed for listener satisfaction aren't THD+N and FR, rather multitone IMD (aka MTPR) and PSRR it makes sense that an amp is given the narrowest possible frequency band to handle. With fewer distinct frequencies present there is going to be lower IMD. Similarly PSRR of an amp is a function of decoupling efficiency and tts much harder to decouple an amp over a wide frequency range than a small one, so narrow band amps are preferred for this reason too.

All this assumes though that an XO can split the frequency bands without introducing IMD or PSRR issues of its own, fortunately passive XOs have this ability needing no power supply and producing vanishingly low IMD at low levels.

In this case I've chosen the TDA8932 as the bass/mid amp and that struggles to deliver clean sound in the HF due to limited PSRR at higher freqs. Yet its bass is the best yet, so it is really suitable for bass/mid duty provided the bandwidth its being asked to deliver is kept as narrow as possible. Hence here I've chosen a steep slope LPF to minimize the IMD generated in the amp and ease its decoupling burden. Time domain performance isn't a concern at this stage, nor is speaker directivity control. I'm curious to see how the amp performs when given the narrowest band of frequencies to reproduce.

The tweeter is being driven via the same type of tweeter bandpass filter I designed last month but with a couple of tweaks. I've moved the crossover frequency lower to 2.5kHz as when I put the tweeter on the siggen, it sounded fine here and looked to have a resonance around 2kHz by which time the bandpass filer is -26dB. The lower the XO frequency the better here from the point of view of the TDA8932 - also it means this XO should be at least suitable for a 6.5" bass/mid eventually. I also decided to try out the T-network instead of the pi-network topology as in this application I do like to have an input inductor and AC couple with capacitor anyway. So why not save on a couple of parts?

The post amplifiers will be AD815s as usual but I've found that a 2nd order filter (single ended) between these and their output trafos helps lower the perceived noise even more..

Update : It has occurred to me that Lynn Olson's thread 'Beyond Ariel' is another example of amplifier-centric system design. For Lynn though the constraints are rather different - he's not inclined to increase the number of amplifier channels (since his all-triode Karna monoblocs are rather expensive to build) so is using passive XOs. For me I consider that decent sounding (solid state) amplifier watts are going to be considerably more affordable than that, hence I'll just go with as many channels as called for to obtain the best sound.

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