See the Version Details page for more. WinPCD is periodically updated. Tablet support is under development. Crossover Design with MATLAB Audio and Speaker-building March 24, 2007 On to your own experiments! It is an optional window (as are all others) and can be re-sized to any dimensions desired. Graph of driver equalized response phase now inverts if driver connection is inverted. In the fall of 1995 I did some consulting, along with a colleague of mine, for a well-known speakers manufacturer. My intention is to start with driver selection, go on to enclosure modeling, electrical and frequency response testing, crossover design and integration, all the way to fine-tuning. Introduction. These can all be re-sized. The Legend button has been there along with those that match the original PCD. They would have been redundant, plus it opened up space for repositioning other controls. The thumbnails at the bottom are the latest and will open a new tab/window of a full screen shot each. The buttons have been eliminated. The output now simply goes to zero appropriately. David Ralph's WinPCD was written to provide the same functionality without needing Excel. I've added some multi-threading to the calculations. When checking the code I saw a couple of other things that I didn't like related to the off-axis response results. Another quick update. Virus-free and 100% clean download. The 2-way part is essentially complete or all but the 3-D spatial aspect required to be able to use minimum-phase driver responses. New screen captures are included at the end of the page here. A Windows application for designing passive crossovers originally based on the UI format of the Passive Crossover Designer spreadsheet by Jeff Bagby. Version 1 will not produce correct results for this specific case. At Humble Homemade Hifi we offer all stages of design work in regards to loudspeakers crossovers. There are also two additional text displays on the polar plot window. This meant having to manually edit all elements that may have changed. The impedance was correct, but the SPL was not due to a typo in the copy section. Get Windows Passive Crossover Designer alternative downloads. 1. I never use them. Added export and import of individual driver crossover circuit elements. A few small layout changes have been made. Speaker crossover networks are always a requirement with any system using two or more loudspeaker drivers. This is partly due to my having changed the order of appearance in a list. This includes zoom/unzoom and save/print functions. The GUI has been cleaned up and changes to the polar section provides -90 to +90 degree coverage at constant radius with surface plots available off-axis 2D plots. I'll have to find the mechanism for that, though it did not do that with a fresh start of the program, only after I had done a program reset. Passive Crossover Designer - Design passive crossovers and equalization networks. The second bug had to do with multiple woofers. WinPCD Installation Information and Download links. Highly recommended reading is Project 82 - Loudspeaker Test Box. New circuits window option is available and resizable. I wanted to be able to import a file with the data. Noteworthy changes are listed below. There was room for more and they are fairly easily added, so I've expanded them. WinPCD Forum at Meniscus Audio; Background and History. The midrange section is complete as is the full 3-way functionality. I had intended to eventually have it read and update. But as I write this it occurs to me that I may not be saving these filenames with the project file. It stays as read in from the input file. A Windows application for designing passive crossovers originally based on the UI format of the Passive Crossover Designer spreadsheet by Jeff Bagby. Made crossover reinitialization changes to thoroughy reset all associated circuits. If you decide to use it, please consider contributing your experience at the forum. A new window can be opened that has the schematics of the current design with component value overlays. This is for both curves and crossover element values. The design actions all have to come from the main screen, however. Multiple woofer formats are now functional (WTW, TWW) including 3-D spatial. The Passive Crossover Designer 8 is a crossover simulation and speaker design tool built into an Excel spreadsheet. December 30, 2017 123Toid. It's a complete re-write in C#/.NET using Visual Studio 2010. These are for saving FRD and ZMA files. Two requested changes hvae been added, plus a few minor bug fixes (see Version Details). It can help you design a 2-way or 3-way passive crossover network, a high-pass, band-pass or low-pass filter, an impedance equalization network, an L-pad and a series or parallel notch filter. Driver filter UI changes, added Bessel filter variants and other user requested UI changes. DIY Speakers and Subs. Additional curve save-to-file items being considered. Details of the polar reponse/spatialization are in a Help window as it relates to WinPCD. Excel application for designing passive crossovers and equalization The purpose of the this spreadsheet is to allow the user to accurately simulate the frequency, phase, and impedance of a two or three way speaker with crossover using imported data files of the actual measured responses. These are provided in a separate window, opened on request (a new button) and tabbed for each circuit, so it's possible do display the circuits anywhere while working. Passive crossover filters can not 'adjust' the woofer's SPL response below 200-300 Hz. parallel or series before/after the XO). I've been using reload of saved sessions for so long that I did not discover an error that was created with a change I had made elsewhere. I think that there's a difference in how I calculate excess-phase and how Jeff handled it, but I think that this method will prove useful. The lack of a number of beta testers has reared its ugly head! Several more changes and some bug fixes are complete. Previously, when the polar plot window was selected the whole application froze during the calculation period. Added Project Name and Comment controls to the system tab screen. This articles describes how you can design your own crossover networks for your Hi-Fi speaker set. This took several minutes to complete on my old PC and somewhat old laptop that has an I7 cpu. I do not display the element numbers, but the match ought to be obvious given the physical location in the circuits. Added new window with calculations and graph for Listening Window (Polar) Response. There is another new tab that shows the basic equivalent circuits of a raw driver and for the low frequency box analysis (Thiele-Small). This should make it a bit easier to see what you've set up. BUG FIX - 3-Way with third or fourth order electrical lowpass on the midrange had a bug with the third element. One was crashing the program. While you're there, peruse the rest of the Meniscus site. I may address mouse hover as a completely separate issue and make appropriate changes to code. It currently mirrors the original PCD. This provides more real estate for possible later use. Two bug fixes are included. This will likely not change because of the many other design actions that involve more than just the component values. The system impedance summed response is now included (I overlooked that). This makes both graphs available from any tab. Things are really coming together now. The program now has more functionality, a few bug fixes, some improved ergonimics in the controls and some layout changes. The save option(s) will be at the end of the list. Any time the polar plot window is making calculations, the user can manipulate other windows. There are a few other changes and one addition. The user can also increase/decrease the instructions window fonts using the standard Windows option, the "ctrl mousewheel" combination. These are close to the final version for what I'll call Release 1.0 when it comes out. WinPCD now has a more response UI when the polar plot calculations are being made. Completed crossover output to file. This is a must have for anyone who wants to start off building their own crossovers. Added a control to make 3-D spatial "Active/Inactive". Plik Passive Crossover Designer 6.0 User Guide and Tutorial.zip na koncie użytkownika Xman_PL • folder Audio Design (Dźwięk projektowanie) • Data dodania: 14 sty 2014 If you compare this version of the midrange page to the woofer or tweeter page, you'll see that the circuit elements that are unused disappear. The raw driver phase is never changed in any way. The link will is at the top of this page. After working on the design update of a previous circuit for my Chameleon 2-way, I decided that I wanted to view the summed response with the previous woofer circuit. Two otherwise identical drivers may not radiate the same way, such as convex vs. concave domes/cones. There are possible issues if you use newer versions (2010 and on) of Excel, maybe others can chime in about that. Minor fixes for filter export to file and session file save/restore. One was to have the system graph "detachable". This will make it easier to keep track of files used in a design. The buttons will eventually be removed. In any case, this has been fixed. Circuits may be printed from the new window by clicking the circuit itself. It is a free program, that can take a little getting used to. Bessel crossovers have a frequency response between Linkwitz-Riley and Butterworth crossovers. Data in other elements are not lost if you make a change to remove them, they just no longer appear and are removed from the circuit calculations. Thus, passive crossovers deal with speaker level signals, which are much more powerful than the line level signals that pass through an audio mixer. The first beta (2-Way only) is essentially done. Some re-arrangement has already been made. With that venting off my chest, there is now an option for the user to specify a default directory (folder in Microsoft parlance) for each project (session) file. The indicator is now in the graph for both the driver and system. The system page will have room left by the move of the impedance graph. This began as a simple bug fix based on a report from a user. The other problem occurred with Jeff's and my exported files due to the interpolation routine. All graph right-click context menu options for save-to-file have been implemented. I think I missed this because I don't usually eliminate a crossover once I'm designing. It's always best to use actual measurements if possible. While waiting for some feedback from beta testers, I continued work and testing as well. The addition is one that I have wanted, the ability to print a schematic with the component values. These are instructions, schematic layouts and generic circuits. The details are left to the user to include in the filename and/or directory in which they save them. The goal is to eventually output a circuit populated with the actual values, but for now the output will be the generic circuits provided in the original PCD that show the circuits with Jeff's original numbering. Asymmetric targets are now functioning for the midrange plus a couple of minor bug fixes related to targets are included. More detail in Version Details page. It was not to be held at the company's headquarter but … Complete re-write of the instructions. I may try to dig that out of Jeff's Excel file or I may try to figure out the basics myself, there is a basic equation in Martin Collom's book "High Peformance Loudspeakers" (after Beranek). Windows Passive Crossover Designer is a Windows application program patterned after Jeff Bagby's Excel spreadsheet, the Passive Crossover Designer (PCD). being created. Download: http://audio.claub.net/software/jbabgy/PCD.html, Video Tutorial Playlist: Can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6hjpiCHZmIPx3itPeTt7zoSqNY20OQqV. Jump to Latest Follow I'm not sure what will come after phase inversion, probably the 3-D space settings for non-coincident (minimum-phase) measurements. I've made more changes than I expected since the last update. Mid-range speakers are fed with frequencies in the range of 300 Hz to 5 kHz, and Sub-Woofers with 300 Hz to 40 Hz. This was always planned, but I did it now rather than wait for another update. Re-calculations to the equalized response is automatic. Design a 2-way high / low pass crossover with a range of choices for type and order. I was also able to remove an option in the list that wasn't of good use. A forum here at my site was out of the question. In trying to make the import more flexible and allow for various comment line styles, it didn't handle Jeff's PCD export. The first one has to do with the electrical crossover selection. Added optional field to provide a default directory (folder) for IO of file operations. The one thing that you can't do is change any of the circuits or drivers during this time because that would normally trigger a new calculation that would interfere with the polar plot calculations. That took another day or so, largely due to what I would call quirks in the way one has to do this within Visual Studio. I haven't looked into the calculations yet. The latter includes things like scrolling using the scroll wheel and hover issues. 31 Aug 2013 - Updated to Version 1.106 (bug fixes, see Version Details), 24 Aug 2013 - Updated to Version 1.105 (see Version Details). These were pulled from the page at my web site. I had already found a unique problem related to my saved files. The save-curve-to-file buttons associated with graphs seemed like unnecessary usage of real estate. There was also a problem with printing the basic circuit images when the package was installed on another PC. AS soon as v1 was released, requests were made for some changes. 3 Way Crossover Design Example Note, this sample crossover makes use of many of the calculators found on the menu on the left. This became a bit tedious, since I test all along the way of making and verifying changes. Added the fundamental automatic calculations. You can see SPL and impedance impact when working on any filter. If the file is not found, it is ignored. Input circuit compensation needs to be implemented. This will likely become the go-to place for help/information/ideas. These are updated in real-time when the user makes changes in the main window. Making the UI responsive during the time required quite a bit of refactoring of the code, but I'm pleased with the result. It doesn't make a big change, but does speed it up a bit. However, you can choose to simplify things When using a passive crossover network, one amplifier channel is used to power multiple drivers. The Windows Form automatically read the files and triggered the calculations, to my surprise. The latest screen captures don't show the phase, that's just because of how I was using it at the time. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), http://audio.claub.net/software/jbabgy/PCD.html, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6hjpiCHZmIPx3itPeTt7zoSqNY20OQqV. This course is the last piece in the loudspeaker design process. These are included in the new file. An unintended added functionality was introduced with saving of the imported filenames. It is designed after the Excel spreadsheet created by Jeff Bagby. 1.1xx versions are minor updgrades/fixes. Both problems are fixed, unless testing finds something additional. Resize Text: aA aA aA. Added the imported filenames to the project save file. It allows you to see just how much change occurs with phase/summed response due to excess-phase to the listening position specified. Most woofers with low-to-medium sized diameters, exhibit a significant SPL step in the 100-500Hz frequency range due to baffle diffraction. This control value is saved with the project file. As we have already explained in the tutorials' section, reflections in our lab environment make SPL response measurement inaccurate below approximately 300Hz-400Hz. That should avoid the problem. On the basis of frequency response, filters can be classified as high pass, low pass, band pass, Notch, band reject, T-Notch, all pass and equalizer filters. Trusted Windows (PC) download Windows Passive Crossover Designer 1.5. Due to some repositioning of controls I was able to increase the height of the system windows a small bit. Graph curve buttons need to be implemented. A passive crossover is most commonly enclosed within the speaker cabinet, itself. I've found and fixed a couple more small bugs having to do with the woofer (2nd and 3rd) traps that came about when adding the new inductor resistance elements. You should also review the Crossover Guide for help with this example.. For this example, I picked 3 ScanSpeak drivers for a 3-way speaker (the same 3 used on the Speaker Box Example.Note: This example old and the characteristics of these drivers have since changed. Re: Passive Crossover Designer -- Any Beginner Tutorial Videos? There was some quircky operation if the user created a short-circuit. The WordPress blog here was to serve that purpose, but the problems that I've read about spamming those that are fully open meant that it would be restricted to those with supplied access. That is now complete. The latter would be better since you never know if some refinement would be useful. The raw data was not displayed on the graphs, however. Design you own speaker crossover. It wasn't until i really got into DIY speaker building that I understood how wrong I was. This allows use of measurements that include differing driver response due to driver, angle and diffration effects. If this plot could be shown in 3-D you would see the surface of a hemisphere Anyone could, but that meant actively managing account creation and that would be cumbersome. Whichever tab is active is printed. If the user had an electrical crossover selection made (1-4), then changed to "No xxxx Pass Selected", the last selection was not removed. I've reviewed and updated the increment for scroller updates. Session file save needs to be expanded. Butterworth crossovers yield to a peak at the crossover frequency. The system impedance graph is now located beside the system SPL. On the other hand we must be aware of the fact that crossover design is subject to one major flaw which is elaborated below:. There are several 'off-the-wall' designs scattered throughout the Internet that are a case in point, and unless there is real science described in any article you see, it is best avoided.. File export controls for driver equalized curves are functional. A right click on a graph brings up the context menu list. The Design of Active Crossovers is a unique guide to the design of high-quality circuitry for splitting audio frequencies into separate bands and directing them to different loudspeaker drive units specifically designed for handling their own range of frequencies. They also show how the circuit elements not in use are hidden, making it a bit easier to see what you're doing at a glance. Due to the latter, I removed all print/view buttons. Both first order and second order passive filter will be explained in this article. This is fixed. How to use Passive Crossover Designer by Jeff Bagby. Another minor, but useful improvement has also been added. A bug has been found, but there is a workaround for it. The crossover design can make or break any multi-way loudspeaker. Meniscus Audio has done me a great favor and those who decide to try out and/or use WinPCD. Jeff Bagby’s Passive Crossover Designer. It is important to approach crossover design with humility because it truly is an art that requires experience to perfect. I may expand the list of curves that can be saved, since it will be duplication and the list can be increased with no change in layout. I'm considering moving the system impedance graph down to the lower right so that the system SPL and impedance curves will both be visible from any tabbed page rather than just the SPL. Additional data need to be included. Screen captures are not yet available to upload, the changes are rather small. The non-design tabs have all been moved to separate windows. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Graph file/print buttons need to be implemented. So I have helped out by designing some free tutorials to help you learn the program. It ended up as an update and improvement to the predicted off-axis response with a few other small changes to the UI. Each time I stopped and restarted the program, I had to navigate to my test folder for each file. Nothing that identifies the details are in them other than WinPCD version number and driver type. Having the world’s best drivers with a poor crossover design will yield poor results. Jeff reported issues with file import. I found that the off-axis calculations had errors creeping in as the off-axis angle increased. I've added more functionality, completing most all of the 2-way options. will be removed, they are redundant due to the right-click context options available such as graph print or graph save to file. Some (all?) Save Project creates a new version of the file for new form data. The data remains in them, they are simply unused and hidden. While there are many articles elsewhere that discuss passive crossover design, not all follow a scientific approach. Attempts to import the wrong file type, say a woofer file using the tweeter dialog, will be rejected. The audio filters can be passive or active depending upon the use of passive or active components in their designing. An additional feature that seemed logical was to automatically load the files for the drivers when the session file is loaded. There are differences in usage of the original PCD vs. WinPCD. Feel free to visit Jeff’s site to download the program and watch any or all the videos to help learn it. Found and corrected an error in the transfer function calculation. The user has the option of printing this window. Jeff Bagby has some designs posted there as well. It's not a drastic change, but a thread is created for each driver's calculations, rather than being consecutive. You can open new windows and move or close any of them. This release has one major improvement and several small changes. This required a bit more rearrangement, but in the end it's better, at least I think so. The plots are made in concentric circles that are each five degrees apart. The "output file" controls also have not been implemented. click on a progam name to view the full description and download the application. System impedance compensation circuits are now functional.