Upgraded Wedgehorn

[gdougherty]

Two summers ago I built my T48's and a 4-pack of Wedgehorns. I started with the old 6.5" drivers that I happily upgraded with Alpha 8's less than a year later. That took the Wedgehorns from usable to quite nice. The only minor complaint I had with them was the on-axis response that was so different from the off-axis response. The problem was when you stood dead-on and all the high-frequencies beamed off the center of the 8" in addition to the cross-firing tweeters. On a traditional monitor that's the place to be, on the Wedgehorn it made picking a position to EQ from a bit of a question, though I usually EQ'd for off-axis response and the brighter on-axis response would just have to be tolerated.

Today I installed and played some music through an upgraded version with both the piezo HP filter and woofer LP filter. I have yet to screw the back on, so it was missing the fuller bottom-end I'm used to, but otherwise, I no longer have any complaints about my Wedgehorns. Response walking from off to on and back to off-axis is even and still as broad. With everything wired up and the tweeters all in parallel, the sound was much more even, with less of the mid-honkiness that's designed into the WH. With the HP filter in place, I felt comfortable wiring all 4 1005 tweeters in parallel and I'm less worried since RMS is only 125W on the Alpha 8. With all the added sensitivity I should be able to EQ the top end down and keep the tweeter section happy.

Bottom line, IMO, it's well worth it to put all the listed and optional filters into the Wedgehorns if you're building them.

[Tom Smit]

Was the upgraded version the cab itself, or just the tweets? My guess is new cabs judging from your posts elsewhere.
Hearing this review gives me confidence for if/when I need to make some WH.

TomS

[gdougherty]

At the time I built them, there were no filters in the plans, just a resistor in series with the tweeters.
The upgrades were the HP and LP filter, plus I went ahead and put the throat fillers in. Cosmetically, I finally got around to putting pet screen over the ports and the horn throat. Otherwise, they're still the same old Wedgehorn design with square throat, unbraced sides and crossfiring 1005's. In a direct comparison between the melded array and crossfiring side-mounted tweeters, I really couldn't hear that much of a difference. I actually liked the cross-firing setup better when way off axis. Basically, if you can see the tweeters, you can hear them. For my situations, often covering large bands with just 4 monitors, the wide dispersion works very well. For others, you might want the slightly tighter coverage of the melded array.

[Zack Brock]

This is very good news gdoughtery, thanks for sharing. I intend to put the HP & LP filters and the throat fillers in my WH's.