Since the very thing that makes a nearly full-range broadband driver so good at what it does is the lack of a crossover, would I be doing serious harm to its intended performance with a high-pass intended to avoid too much excursion from vinyl rumble, tracks with extremely loud sub-bass, etc?
I’m considering MarkAudio drivers which need precise and clean amplification to avoid break-up and they need to be burned in for a long time with something light before playing any bass-rich sound through them, that’s what they state. So I guess this type of driver is quite fragile, should I high-pass it some to ensure it stays in shape for sure? Or would that be missing the point in terms of its intended usage?
A high pass filter is quite common with vinyl, for precisely the reason of rumbley or slightly warped records 
Exactly, but does passively doing so (in the “crossover” if you can call it that, or rather just a filter) require a big sacrifice in terms of the “directness” that is natural to broadband drivers usually driven without passive components between the amp(s) and them?
Or should it be an electronic crossover?
line level passive filter between pre and power perhaps? (if all the impedances are known)
DAC output impedance and amp input impedance in this case?
I don’t want to high-pass the whole signal before the amp, I would also low-pass two bass drivers per speaker, loaded in a down-firing chamber underneath the broadband driver’s isolated enclosure. So all in all a full range speaker.
you’d need huge coils across the woofers - they’d be at risk of saturation of any core they used too.
There’s always this (though in your case it would need to be on the whole signal):
So I guess I’ll handle the bass section actively.
The nearly full-range drivers, I know they’re fragile, the manufacturer cautions to be careful with amplification… So I don’t want any vinyl rumbles through them. Is it a sin to use a cap for broadbands? Any way to do this… in a very stealthy way?
Of course I want the signal as directly to the broadbands as possible.
Is as much reserve for dynamics as possible best in a capacitor in this application, always? How are the trade-offs here in terms of literal loss or partly irrepairable phase error, etc, for reasonably priced capacitors of today?
Aren’t they fairly good…?
reserve not an issue here as not storing power
to put e.g. a capacitor in series with the full range driver, or an inductor across it, in either case it’s going to be a very high value (hundreds of uF? haven’t done the maths) which will be huge and hugely expensive for a nice film capacitor for example i would have thought, but also would present a highly reactive load to the amp, which may not like it. just a couple of random thoughts that came to mind…
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Ohhh damn, now I suddenly get it!
It takes me a long while of being stupid and then some things click as common sense.
Why would I let infrasonics into any speaker driver? So I’ll just put a line-level subsonic filter before the amp. It’s just that simple…
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Yep that’s prob the best approach
The problem is that if I aim to get this speaker onto market some day, the filter is separate from the speaker. Is there any clever approach to integrate the filter into the speaker without ultra expension?
Hmm. On the other hand, what’s wrong with a separated package if the concept works? These speakers require very precise conditions anyway…