OK I'll kick off of what I can remember of the weekend meet, hopefully Andrew, Nick and Chris will contribute with comments when they have the time.
Andrew arrived the Friday evening and we fired up the 3-way OB's with my 300B SET's. His initial reaction was not as positive as I hoped. He thought the bass was still lacking in the bottom registers so I swapped out the 39uF for a 22+10uf paralleled to give us 32uF, since I didn't have a 33uF next value down single cap. Andrew thought this was too much so I paralleled to this a 2.7uF and to Andrew's ears that sounded a lot better so we stuck with this set up for night and played several CD's for the rest of the night, but Andrew still couldn't put his finger on why to him they were not boogying, he did say he rather tired from a long day so we called it a night and retired early to await the arrival of Nick and Chris in the morning.
Saturday after an initial listen Nick suggested we move the speakers further out into the room and increase the depth of the side panels with some LP covers. This improved things all round and bass depth and extension also increased. To Andrew the speakers were now 'playing music'. His term to mean they were making his foot tap along to the music and Nick agreed. Both liked very much what the Monacor coax drivers were doing and both commented they were hearing nuances in the music they had not noticed before. Still Nick thought the bass could be better having heard them run full range without XO direct from the Longdog P6 amps. So out came the miniDSP to just help boost the bottom end bass. The end result of this experiment though it did incres the bass a little it killed the sound and showed just how bad an effect the standard minDSP was having. So this was abandoned and then it was suggested to try my Fostex T90 supertweeters with the OB's. This had a very positive effect and gave us the best sound of the day (well early evening by then) from the 3-way OB's. I learned 3 things from this:
1. miniDSP's have a detrimental affect on the sound though it may be the latest models have improved some and may not be so poor.
2. OB's need at least 1.5m or more space from walls to give there best.
3. Side wings are an important design aspect of OB's to get good bass response and definition.
So I am now going to make a new set of side frames and bases and inset my T90's into the centre baffle next and inline with the coax drivers.
Unfortunately by that time we all agreed we had had too much beer to try and swap out the coax drivers for the horn tweeters and set the fully active arrangement to test these. This we did Sunday morning.
Before we changed the speakers over to 2-way we refreshed our memory of the sound of the 3-ways.
For the 2-ways the horn tweeter were hooked up to my MF A300 stereo amp, and the 15" bass drivers to the P6 monoblocks.
I suggested a start XO at 1.5kHz. Nick dialled this in the miniDSP and used a very high 48dB/octave slope second order XO. We all commented how good this sounded and that had we not heard how good the 3-way baffles sounded we would all be really impressed how these sounded. We tried 1kHz and a higher XO frequency (I think) and lower order slope XO'ers buy all agreed the initial set up was the best and most satisfying a sound.
The upshot of this though is it would be near impossible to duplicate the miniDSP set up with a passive filter and that the 2-way arrangement would have to be a fully active set up to sound right. Not sure where I'll go with the 2-way OB's.
Sorry to have waffled a little and I may have got a few things wrong. Too much beer, still rather tired from a long exhausting, but thoroughly enjoyable, weekend. I'm sure the other member of the 'committee' will correct me and make further feedback and comments of there views to these speakers.
Ah! I see Nick has beaten me in feedback