Active Crossover Designer (ACD)

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The miniDSP community is full of passionate members who love audio and most importantly are willing to share their knowledge! We want to make sure we do our best to make sure we spread the word about their work.
Introducing the Active Crossover Designer (ACD) by Charlie Laub. Based on a excel file loaded with all the equations required to evaluate the optimal filter for your crossver, the ACD tools is a strongly recommended tool for all speaker designers.

NOTE: This project is free for personal DIY Speaker Design use. Commercial use is prohibited without prior authorization of the author. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for commercial inquiries.

Introduction

The Active Crossover Designer is an active crossover design tool available as Excel spreadsheets and designed for the serious hobbyist. The user can set up the tools from the set of supplied driver and system templates, import FRD files, determine driver offsets for precise phase determinations, and develop crossovers by following the example provided in a tutorial. There is also a comprehensive technical manual. Once the crossover has been designed, rapid implementation is possible using one of the MiniDSP digital crossover products with the advanced biquad programming feature. Analog transfer functions for all filters are also available in the tools.

The conceptual approach for these tools has been to create an "open" platform using commonly available spreadsheet tools that many DIY hobbyists are familiar with. Because all of the calculations are done using spreadsheet formulas that are all visible and accessible, the tools are fully extensible. The user can change any and everything, or add on new functionality, plots, and so on. Some examples of useful add-ons for the CORE TOOLS are provided in the EXTENSIONS section. Currently, only an Excel version is available, however, an OpenOffice Calc version has been developed in parallel and the release is coming (eventually). ACD is written for Excel version 2003 and later, and requires the Analysis Toolpak.

Things you need to get started

  • One miniDSP DSP hardware platform (kit/2x4/balanced/2x8/8x8)
  • One miniDSP plug-in with the Advanced feature for custom biquad.
  • The lates version of ACD tools spreadsheet
  • 1 x measurement microphone + sound card to perform your audio measurements and validate your simulations
  • 1 x PC/Mac running the latest version of Room EQ Wizard (REW) V5 available for download here.
  • A basic understanding of the biquad filter programming as already highlighted in this application note.

Screenshots

ACD tools come up with a fully featured start up guide and user manual. The following pictures are just samples of the type of simulations you can expect out of ACD tools.

driver_response_ACD Tools

ACD_response_pic

ACD_phase_and_GD_plot

Credits

The whole miniDSP team would like to thank Charlie Laub, Author of ACD Tools, for designing such a useful tool! All credits goes to Charlie for putting together this nice tool. If you want to thank him yourself, remember to fire a small email to him or share your experience on our Forum.