Over the weekend, Francesca turned into a fully-active three-way. This was done at the famous “Bathurst GtG” of terry j, with help and advice from several people who listened and commented as things went along, but in particular with assistance from Andrew Ward and Paul Spencer.

The heart of the system is now a pair of miniDSP 2×4 modules, each running as a three crossover/eq unit. (They can also be used as a four-way, which is I think going to be part of Francesca II….). While they take power from USB, I have an external supply connected – something that is really necessary if you are going to be swapping the USB connection between units.

The rest of the electronics are straightforward. For the mid and tweeter, I used a pair of Virtue Audio ONE.2 Tripath amps. Woofers were powered by a Behringer A500. A Cambridge Audio DacMagic and a Bent Audio passive preamp were used as the source. I used my measurement gear as described in this article here.

The whole lot was fairly portable. Also shown in the picture above is also a Weston Acoustics TVC preamp that we were able to use on the last day.

The system was placed in a fairly large room with high ceilings. The room was quite reverberant, with RT60 measured in the 700-950 ms range.

Much tweaking went on over the weekend. Key improvements were made to the tweeter crossover (moved up to 5 kHz), and the approach taken overall to equalization. I also worked a little on some “perceptual” eq adjustments – more on that in a future post. The listeners present all agreed that the sound improved a lot over the course of the weekend.