If that's where we want to live, my experience with the location has a few iron-clad opinions. 1/ why buy inferior fixed passive bass in a big floorstander only to bypass it with superior adjustable active bass? 2/ that self-defeatist question immediately leads to the obvious conclusion not to buy more main-speaker bass than we intend to cover by active subwoofer. 3/ that should logically lead to a smaller possibly stand-mount speaker with response to ~60Hz so there's some output left below where we mean to cross. 4/ given how each halving of frequency requires four times more excursion, preventing the voice coils of our monitor's mid/woofer from seeing any low bass seriously reduces their throw, thus distortion. By not heating up their voice coils the same, it also minimizes dynamic compression as a function of rising voice-coil impedance. What our address in sub.urbia now needs is a precision analog crossover with independently adjustable low/high-pass paths preferably on both RCA and XLR; and plenty of filter-freq options. Enter spl's new Crossover Mk2. To the essential basics it adds 12/24dB slopes for either path, a defeatable 20Hz cut-off to eliminate infrasonic pollution; a mono/stereo subwoofer function; and high-pass defeat to run our mains wide open. Welcome to the neighborhood.
PS: In case you wondered about the lead-in thumbnail, it's Stenheim's new Alumine Sub, a dual 10" isobaric affair in an all-aluminium triple-chamber cab with 1'200 watts of class D power.
spl's website
