The Rollout of Linear Phase Crossovers

Over the past couple days, I rolled out the linear phase filters to my crossovers.

I first made the FIR cooefficient files on my Mac, running the Windows program RePhase (I've contributed to the European author, who is big at DIYAudio) but using the Wine emulator.  It all worked (though took multiple attempts to get it right and figure out how to successfully load on miniDSP and then better optimized--a process which could continue forever).

My first impression was, meh.

It was not clearly such an obviously big deal as my recent bass retuning and use of steeper and higher LR8 crossovers.  That was clearly, from the first moment, a big transformation, even bigger maybe than moving to the 2+2's.  Much more solid imaging, bass, dynamic range, freedom from strain.

But I think I'm hearing potential.  Other than slightly thinner sounding bass (which actually must be a good thing, actually it measures identically on pink noise) there seem to be no significant untoward effects.  No obvious "ringing" as I feared reading Linkwitz.  Maybe just the opposite

As I said, everything sounds thinner, almost everywhere in the room.  When playing pink noise the "flapping" sound I've generally heard before is all but gone, contributing to the sense that the bass disappeared.  But I've always wondered if that wasn't some sort of artifact, and indeed it may be, of group delay in the crossovers.  I have a lot of ways to increase the bass level if I ultimately find the "thinner" sound less enjoyable.

I found the new sound enjoyable on both Classical recordings from the Decca collection and Heavy Bass recordings like Grouse.

Now I need to reset the time alignment, and in particular the tweeter alignment possibly because it uses a different plugin for the 96kHz operation and that plugin has a far smaller set of FIR coefficients.  Doesn't really need more anyway, more are needed al lower frequencies.  But it could upset the time alignment by 30ms.  Which probably wouldn't be extremely audible since the supertweeter output is essentially inaudible nowadays anyway (crossed at 17kHz at 48dB/octave).  But wouldn't be good either.